


Too Close to the Sun

by Philosopher_King



Series: The Three-Body Problem [9]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst and Porn, Avatar State, Blow Jobs, Coming Untouched, Cunnilingus, Depression, Dom/sub Undertones, Face-Sitting, Hand Jobs, Inappropriate Use of Bending (Avatar), Intrusive Thoughts, Masturbation, Minor Mai/Ty Lee (Avatar), Minor Mai/Zuko, Multi, Oral Sex, Orgasm Delay, Outdoor Sex, Overstimulation, Pregnant Sex, Self-destructive Zuko, Suicidal Thoughts, The Promise Comics (Avatar), Threesome - F/M/M, Vaginal Sex, Voyeurism, Zutaraang Week 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:06:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26259133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: "Has Aang ever gone into the Avatar State during... during sex?"Katara rose her eyebrows and blinked a few times. "What would make him do that? Obviously we try to keep it interesting, but we've never done anything genuinely life-threatening...”"But... he can also go into the Avatar State on purpose, right?""Yes, when he needs to consult with his past lives, or summon extraordinary power to deal with a threat.""So... he probably wouldn't be willing to do it for, uh. Other purposes.” Zuko sounded oddly disappointed."Wait. You're not asking if he has; you're asking if he would. Because you want him to? Why?"
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Aang/Katara/Zuko (Avatar), Aang/Zuko (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: The Three-Body Problem [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652515
Comments: 81
Kudos: 187
Collections: Zutaraang Week





	1. The Question

**Author's Note:**

> The (somewhat truncated) first chapter was posted for Day 3 of Zutaraang Week 2020, prompt: Avatar State. Somehow it ended up combined with the bonus prompt: Beach.
> 
> ETA 6 Sept.: With some assistance from spfuzz, who influences me to be more Hamiltrashy than I usually am, I changed the title to something better than "Untitled Avatar State Smut." It's also in keeping with the theme of my Zutaraang series, [The Three-Body Problem](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652515). I've added it into the series in the chronologically appropriate place, but you don't actually need to have read anything else to understand it... well, a few things might make more sense if you've read [Angle of Incidence](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23974972/chapters/57667084), but it's not necessary.

It was another sultry day on Ember Island, where the Avatar’s family had joined the Fire Lord’s for a brief holiday at the royal family's beach house. The heat was verging on uncomfortable for Katara, who was used to the chill of the South Pole. She and Zuko were reclining in chaises longues under the shade of a canopy that had been set up for them—well, really for Mai, who couldn’t tolerate too much sun exposure. But she was currently walking slowly along the shore with Aang, both of them bent to point out pretty shells to little toddling Bumi and Izumi (almost three and one-and-a-half years old, respectively).

Katara and Zuko were sipping from stoneware cups of mango and watermelon juice that Katara kept refreshingly chilled. Zuko’s was spiked with shochu (or soju, as they called it in the eastern islands), and Katara’s would have been too if she weren’t four months pregnant.

“Um, Katara,” Zuko said suddenly after a long stretch of comfortable silence that had Katara almost dozing off in the heat. “Can I ask you something?”

He sounded a little nervous, which instantly piqued Katara’s curiosity, effectively banishing her drowsiness. “If you have to ask,” she said dryly, “the answer is probably ‘no.’”

“Oh. Okay,” said Zuko, then fell silent again.

Katara sighed. “ _Joking_ , Zuko. What did you want to ask?”

“Oh!” Zuko sounded even more flustered, and looked it, too, which started to arouse something other than Katara’s curiosity. “Um,” he started again, already blushing. “Has Aang ever gone into the Avatar State during… during sex?”

Katara rose her eyebrows and blinked a few times. “What would make him do that? Obviously we try to keep it interesting, but we’ve never done anything genuinely _life-threatening_ … and while we both see the value in a little frustration, I wouldn’t want to piss him off that much, either.”

“But… he can also go into the Avatar State on purpose, right?”

“Yes… when he needs to consult with his past lives, or summon extraordinary power to deal with a threat.”

“So… he probably wouldn’t be willing to do it for, uh. Other purposes.” Zuko sounded oddly disappointed.

“Wait. You’re not asking if he _has_ ; you’re asking if he _would_. Because you want him to? Why?”

Katara was genuinely puzzled. She, Aang, and Zuko had been lovers long enough to explore all sorts of inappropriate uses for bending. Bloodbending had been the first and most obvious—at first just to immobilize, more securely than with rope, then as Katara’s skill and precision developed, to spur on arousal or delay release by pushing blood into or away from a specific part of her lovers’ bodies. Well, mostly just Zuko’s; while Aang was game to try almost anything at least once, he found Katara’s intimate control far less thrilling and more unnerving than Zuko did. He was more amenable to Zuko’s use of heat and tiny sparks of lightning to enliven the sensation of his touch, and was even willing to reciprocate and sometimes to do the same for Katara when Zuko was not there to do it himself. Their most recent experiment was with the _very carefully controlled_ withdrawal of air to enhance the experience of orgasm—Zuko’s suggestion, as usual, to which Aang had reluctantly been persuaded… partly by Zuko’s pointing out that it was much easier to control, and less likely to leave suspicious marks, than the way the effect was usually achieved.

But Katara really wasn’t sure what the Avatar State could add—other than, perhaps, the experience of previous Avatars… which at this point in Aang’s life was probably less useful in this arena, where he had gained quite enough experience and expertise already, than in the high-stakes moral quandaries and delicate matters of international or human–spirit diplomacy that the Avatar sometimes found himself faced with.

Zuko didn’t look straight at Katara when he answered. “I just wondered if… I don’t know. If it might be better, more intense, either for him or for whoever he’s with. All that concentrated power, physical and spiritual, and the combined knowledge and experience of hundreds of past lives…”

Katara wasn’t completely convinced. “If you’re looking for sex tips from Kuruk or Kyoshi—or if you think Aang needs them—you could always ask him to meditate, talk to them, and report back. He doesn’t need to be in the Avatar State during the act.”

“No, it’s not… it’s not that I think he needs advice. It’s about whether the state itself would make a difference.”

“Hmm.” Something still struck Katara as… _off_ about this question. “Why are you asking me first, rather than just asking Aang directly?”

Zuko shrugged one shoulder, still evading eye contact. “I was a little afraid he might be horrified, or offended.”

“I don’t think he’d be offended… though I think he might also be a little confused. You should really ask him, though, if you’re that curious.”

“All right. Thanks, Katara.” Zuko finally looked back up at her to flash a small smile.

Aang and Mai came back to join them under the shade of the canopy, the children running ahead as fast as their short and, in Izumi’s case, still a little unsteady legs could carry them. Bumi reached Katara first, holding out a big conch shell, crying, “Mommy, look! Daddy says you hear wind.” He held it up to her ear to demonstrate.

“Daddy says you can hear the wind in it? That’s funny, I always thought it was the sea that you could hear…”

Izumi reached Zuko a few seconds later and threw her arms around him, almost knocking the drink out of his hand; he hurriedly set it down on a low table beside him so that he could return the hug. “Is everything okay, Zooms?” he asked, looking surprised and a bit concerned. (‘Booms’ and ‘Zooms’ were matching nicknames concocted by Toph and Sokka, who were bad enough in isolation but incorrigible in combination, that despite Katara’s gradually fading annoyance had managed to stick.)

“Miss you, Daddy!” Izumi chirped, not sounding at all distressed.

“You missed me? But you’ve only been gone half an hour!”

“She doesn’t have much of a concept of time yet,” Mai said dryly from behind her daughter. “At least beyond ‘I want that now’ and ‘not bedtime.’”

“Bumi’s not much better,” said Katara. “Or maybe it’s just the concept of _waiting_ that he has a problem with…”

“Drink?” Mai said pointedly to Zuko.

“The ‘I want that now’ concept of time may not change with age,” Zuko teased her, even as he poured a small measure of shochu into a cup and then filled it with juice from a pitcher in an insulated chest they had brought out with them. He passed it to Katara for a little extra chilling, and then she handed it up to Mai.

“It remains effective,” Mai drawled, raising her glass in a little mock-toast of thanks. She sat down in a chaise on Zuko’s other side. He poured cups of juice without the shochu for Aang and for the kids, and helped Izumi try to drink it without spilling it all over herself or him.

Later in the afternoon, they took the kids inside for a nap, with more than the usual amount of protest—vacation at Ember Island offered so many enticements to stay awake!—but much less than the usual amount of time before they were fast asleep.

“Zuko has a question for you,” Katara said quietly to Aang as they closed the door to Bumi’s bedroom.

“Oh?”

“He asked me first because he was worried about offending you.”

“I’m not _that_ easily offended,” Aang protested (only mildly offended at the suggestion).

“It is… an unusual question. But I told him he really should ask you.”

“Well, now I’m intrigued…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the abrupt chapter break; it's late and this is what I've got so far...
> 
> Estimated chapter count is unstable, as usual.


	2. The Proposal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko asks Aang about sex in the Avatar State and they decide to run an experiment; the three lovers spend a rare, productive evening together.

They would have the opportunity to speak (among other things) later, just the three of them, when Mai would be similarly occupied with Ty Lee, whose position as chief of security for the Fire Nation’s royal family gave her a perfectly respectable reason to be in the same place as the Fire Lord’s wife most of the time.

Ty Lee also joined them for dinner once her shift had ended and her deputy took over supervising the defense of the beach house and grounds. She was always a favorite with the children, who were drawn to her sunny smile and easy laugh, fascinated with the sleight-of-hand tricks she had picked up during her circus days, and entranced by the minor acrobatic feats she could sometimes be persuaded to perform.

After dinner, they put the children to bed; there was some token complaining, but they were thoroughly worn out from a day of combing the beach for treasures, wading into the surf (under the watchful eye of two waterbenders), and skating over the sand on miniature (and slowed-down) versions of Aang’s air scooters.

After the children were safely asleep, Zuko, Aang, and Katara retired to the largest bedroom in the luxurious house, Mai and Ty Lee to the second-largest.

“Have fun, dear,” Mai said to Zuko with a little smirk, then kissed him on the cheek.

“Same to you,” he said with a nod to Ty Lee, who gave him a casual salute.

The three of them were finally alone. Zuko sat properly, in _seiza_ , on one of the cushions on the floor next to a small table where the room’s occupant might take tea or breakfast; Katara sat cross-legged beside him. Aang, meanwhile, fell dramatically into a sprawl on the enormous futon, then propped himself up on one elbow to look over at his partners.

“So, Zuko. Katara says you wanted to ask me something?” His tone was light, cheerful, deliberately trying to sound as inviting and non-judgmental as possible.

Nonetheless, Zuko still looked embarrassed; his gaze kept shifting away from Aang’s until he brought it back with conscious effort. “Yes. Um. I was wondering if you’d ever considered going into the Avatar State… during sex. Not to consult your past lives or anything; just to… see what it was like.”

Aang looked just as surprised as Katara had been. “No, I can’t say I have considered it.”

“ _Would_ you consider it?” Zuko asked, finally getting to the point. His voice sounded a little strained.

“Uh. Maybe? It does allow incredible focus, and everything is sort of heightened… It seems potentially dangerous, though. More dangerous than the other things we’ve done with bending, even.”

“Ah. Right. You think you might not be able to maintain control?” Zuko’s voice was trembling slightly, though Katara had little idea why.

Aang frowned—just thinking, or mildly affronted? “No, I don’t lose control of it anymore… though I don’t know what would happen if sex were added to the situation. It might be… distracting enough that my control would falter. I’m afraid I would hurt the person I was with… not to mention whatever building we were in.” He cracked a wry smile.

“You could always try it outdoors,” Zuko suggested.

“That only solves one problem,” Katara pointed out. “I suppose if you’re curious—and I admit, you’ve gotten _me_ a little curious now—you could try doing it by yourself, Aang, and see if the physical sensations interfere with your ability to control your power.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” said Aang, scratching his beard pensively. “Though of course it’s not exactly the same… things are more intense with another person, and there’s just… more going on, so there’s even more of a potential to get dangerously distracted.” He paused, still frowning in thought. “Why are you asking about this, anyway?”

Zuko shrugged, not looking directly at Aang. “Just curious,” he said. “I thought the experience might be interesting.”

A skeptical “Really?” burst from Katara’s mouth before she could stop it. Aang and Zuko both turned abruptly to look at her. “It seemed to me like there was more to it than that,” she explained.

Zuko’s gaze shifted slightly away from hers again. “Maybe,” he admitted. “There’s something thrilling about that element of danger, isn’t there?”

Aang sat up from his recline to sit cross-legged like Katara, leaning forward with an expression of alarm. “Not _actual_ danger,” he said. “Sure, it can _feel_ dangerous when we play with bloodbending or lightning, but it’s only all right to do it because we’re always in control, so it’s actually perfectly safe.”

“Says the man whose favorite hobby is traveling the world finding dangerous animals to ride,” Zuko retorted.

“I guess it’s different when he _is_ the dangerous animal,” Katara said slyly. Zuko turned red and covered his face with his hand; Aang gave an indignant gasp.

“I don’t do that anymore! Not very often, anyway,” he amended when Katara raised her eyebrows at him, mouthing _“Snow leopard caribou?”_ “They are trained to be ridden!” he protested.

“Not the _feral ones!”_

Aang pulled a face. “Okay, fine. But I don’t like bringing actual danger into _sex_. That’s not what it’s supposed to be about. It’s about _love_ , and I never want to put people I love in danger. I know I have, and I do,” he said, putting up a hand to forestall the objection Zuko was opening his mouth to make. “Being the Avatar means _constantly_ putting the people I love in danger; it has since the moment Katara found me. No, even before that; my people wouldn’t have been killed if I hadn’t been the Avatar.”

A shadow of unspeakable grief crossed Aang’s face. It made Katara wonder, as she so often did when he spoke of the Air Nomads, how he could remain so joyful, so optimistic, so full of love of life and faith in humanity.

“But I’ve never had a choice about that,” Aang continued quietly. “I would never do it _deliberately_ , unnecessarily.”

Zuko nodded. “I understand,” he said. It was subtle, but Katara thought he sounded disappointed again.

Aang must have heard it too, because he cocked his head, brow furrowed inquisitively, and said, “I’m getting the sense this is more important to you than you’re letting on.”

Zuko gave a faintly nervous little laugh. “Important? No, not really.”

“You weren’t getting bored of us, were you?” Katara teased him, half-hoping she could steer them away from the topic and that would be the end of it. As much as she wanted to know what this was really about, in Zuko’s mind, she also wanted to take full advantage of this time when all three of them were together, and exploring the twists and turns of Zuko’s psyche wasn’t exactly what she’d had planned.

“Bored? Never,” he declared, and leaned forward to kiss her. She pushed herself up onto her knees to meet him halfway; their balance faltered and he put a hand on the table to stabilize them.

“Are you going to bring it over here, or am I going to have to come join you on the floor?” Aang asked dubiously from his perch on the futon.

Katara laughed against Zuko’s lips. “I think we’d better come to you,” she said.

“I’m getting a little old for floor sex,” Zuko agreed.

“But not too old for potentially violent Avatar State sex?” Aang asked, incredulous.

“I’ll risk discomfort for the possibility of more significant rewards…”

“And the reward is what?” Aang asked as Zuko knelt on the bed beside him.

“That’s what I’d like to find out,” Zuko answered, and leaned over to kiss Aang, pushing him onto his back.

“Okay, you’ve convinced me,” Aang said after he broke the kiss. “I’ll do some… preliminary investigation tomorrow.”

“While we’re outside for exercises tomorrow morning?” Zuko asked eagerly.

“Hey, no fair. You get to watch and I don’t?” Katara protested, prodding Zuko in the shoulder.

“You’re always welcome to join us,” Aang said sweetly.

Katara nudged Zuko out of the way so she could kneel over her husband, knees on either side of his hips, hair falling down around his face. “Why do you morning people always have to be such sanctimonious jerks about it?” she demanded, her nose an inch away from his.

“Because you’re missing the best part of the day!” Aang said, grinning saucily.

“You’re saying _this_ isn’t the best part of the day?” she purred, caressing the shoulder he now left bare only when alone with his closest friends—seldom in public anymore, now that he was a married man of thirty, and a father besides—then slipping her hand under his chogyu to toy with a nipple, making him draw in a hissing breath.

Katara felt Zuko’s hand push her hair aside, then his mouth was on the side of her neck. “You know, this can also be done first thing in the morning,” he murmured just below her ear.

“Are you telling me _meditating_ and _firebending practice_ aren’t the only things you do when you get up at the crack of dawn?” she huffed in half-feigned indignation.

“No, since we tend to do that outdoors, where we could be seen,” Zuko said matter-of-factly.

Katara bent to kiss her way down Aang’s neck while tugging at his sash. “But you’ll have to find somewhere secluded to run your _experiment_ ,” she noted.

“We might have to take Appa—oh!—a ways out,” Aang panted, as Katara pulled his chogyu aside to lick and suck at the exposed nipple.

“Nothing like a sunrise flight,” said Zuko, reaching around Katara’s waist to untie her sash as well. He pulled her dress off her shoulder so that he could kiss down from her neck along its angle, making her shudder against Aang’s chest. “You’re more than welcome to join us.”

“I guess I’ll just have to see how I’m feeling in the morning,” she said, even as she continued to undress her husband. She sucked the other nipple into a hard brown peak, and Aang arched up into her touch. She felt his hardening length twitch against her stomach through two layers of clothing. “One of us should probably be here when the kids wake up,” she pointed out.

“You had to mention the kids right now…?” Aang complained breathlessly.

“Someone has to think the practical thoughts,” she said, already unlacing his trousers. Zuko, meanwhile, had pulled her dress the rest of the way off so that she was down to just the sarashi around her chest and hips.

“Zuko’s still wearing all his clothes,” Aang observed. “That seems like a practical problem to me.”

“Oh no! Whatever shall we do about this?” Katara gasped. She freed Aang’s legs so that she could turn around, and he took advantage of the opportunity to sit up.

“Oh shit,” said Zuko, half a second before they both tackled him. He was naked in short order, while Aang was still wearing his half-unlaced trousers and Katara her hip sarashi, though somewhere amid the melee Zuko had managed to unwrap the ones around her chest. “Well, this isn’t fair either,” he pouted, then gasped when Aang licked a stripe along his cock before closing his lips around it.

“I don’t know, I think you’re doing pretty well in this situation,” said Katara, and leaned over to kiss him. He reached up to knead the soft flesh of her breasts, which four months into her pregnancy were already larger and more sensitive than usual, and they both moaned into the kiss. Zuko pulled his lips away to order her breathlessly, “Over my face.”

“You sure?” she asked, but of course he always was. So she swung a leg over him and inched forward so that she was crouched over his mouth and lowered herself carefully. She shuddered when his tongue brushed over her clit and bent over with a sharp gasp to brace herself with her hands when she felt his mouth latch onto her, tongue swiping deep into her folds and then back to her clit, where he circled his tongue around it while sucking, leaving her panting, almost sobbing, overwhelmed by the sensation but still bucking against his mouth, desperate for more.

Aang had abandoned his attentions to Zuko and came around to push her hair back and watch the helpless rapture on her face. Well, not so helpless: she lifted one shaky arm from the bed to wrap her hand around the back of Aang’s neck and pull him forward to kiss her, open and messy as she gasped for air between presses of their lips. At last the sensation mounting between her legs broke through an invisible dam and swept in successive waves all through her body; her arm could no longer support her limp, trembling weight and she collapsed face-down onto both forearms.

Zuko carefully pulled his head out from under her while Aang tenderly stroked her hair, murmuring some nonsense about how beautiful she looked when she came, which she seriously doubted because _everyone’s_ orgasm face looked ridiculous. Zuko was behind her now, running gentle hands along her still-twitching calves.

“Whew,” she finally said, and raised her head. “Lie down,” she ordered Aang. “I have some unfinished business with you.”

“Yes, sir!” he said, with what looked like it might have been an attempt at a Fire Navy salute. The unimpressed noise Zuko made from behind her confirmed that guess.

“You,” she said, turning to look over her shoulder at Zuko. “It’s your opportunity to fuck me, because I can’t get any more pregnant than I am.”

“Your wish is my command, my lady,” he said, and bowed from a seated position… which looked more than a little absurd when he was naked and erect. She snorted at his show of decorum.

“Now, where were we?” she said, turning back toward Aang. “Oh yes…” She resumed unlacing his trousers and he helped her pull them off, leaving only his undershorts, which she carefully eased down over the erection that was straining at the tight fabric. Once those were off, too, she bent to take him in her mouth, relishing his sigh of pleasure and relief.

While her head was low, she kept her hips canted high to present Zuko with an easy target. She took her mouth off Aang first to catch her breath, then to say, “Any day now, Your Fire Lordship.”

“Just waiting for you to get settled,” Zuko said, still polite, before he raised the back flap of the underskirt still wrapped around her hips, guided himself to her opening, and pushed in, drawing a long sigh from her lips. His first few strokes were gentle, but he soon began to drive in harder in an insistent rhythm.

It wasn’t often that he got to fuck her like this. They had to be excruciatingly careful, because they could not afford an accident: if Katara had a firebending child, the whole world would be able to guess who the father was, and that would endanger Zuko’s reign as well as Aang’s authority among the nations. So when she and Zuko were together, they usually did other things: they brought each other off with their hands and mouths, or she fucked him with the device he had introduced to her and Aang (to their great and lasting benefit), a polished aardvark-tortoiseshell phallus that she wore strapped around her hips.

But she did enjoy it when Zuko fucked her, too, not least because he did it so differently than Aang did—not gentle and meditative, in slow uneven waves like the ocean or the wind through the trees, but forceful and steady, relentless and tireless, like one of his nation’s efficient machines; like the pistons of his ship’s steam engine, silent but for the harshened breaths he took in time with his thrusts. Usually she could only indulge her desire if they were together during the time of her monthly bleeding—neither of them minded the mess (as long as they weren’t on sheets that someone else would have to wash)—and even then Katara made sure to drink some of the tea that Yugoda, the Northern Water Tribe’s head healer, had given her (a good-sized leather pouch of dried herbs and flowers, and the recipe to make more when her supply ran out). In more recent years they had been able to indulge more often, since Toph had introduced them to an innovation from her hometown of Gaoling: a little sleeve made of oiled silk paper or lamb intestine, thin and flexible enough to preserve most sensation, but (in theory) strong and impervious to fluid. Still, Katara was cautious enough to drink Yugoda’s tea afterward, and they avoided the days she knew she was most fertile (in recent years, she had reserved those days for Aang).

But an existing pregnancy, of course, was the most reliable form of contraception, and she and Zuko had been taking enthusiastic advantage of that whenever they could. For reasons Katara didn’t completely understand, Zuko seemed to be turned on by the fact that she was pregnant… well, she would have understood it if it had been _his_ child—the spirits knew Aang couldn’t keep his hands off her as she grew big with their first—but Zuko seemed no less enthralled with her heavy breasts and swollen belly even though he knew the child was Aang’s. Perhaps it was just some kind of instinct, or perhaps he felt the child was his, too, in a way, because it was theirs and he loved them.

Now, too, Zuko had a firm, protective hand over her belly, which was only barely beginning to show the presence of the life growing inside, while he plunged into her with those deep, swift, even strokes. She braced herself with one arm to keep the pressure of her mouth on Aang steady, but she couldn’t stop the moans that vibrated through her throat and lips—especially when Zuko found just the right angle to send sparks tingling up her spine—which prompted Aang to arch and moan in response, just barely stopping himself from thrusting into her mouth, his hips trembling with the effort of holding back. She took her mouth away and began stroking him with her hand, murmuring encouragement interspersed with her own groans and gasps as Zuko brought her closer to the edge of another climax. Aang cried out and came in her hand and over his stomach, then after a few steadying breaths sat up to catch Katara’s sounds of pleasure in his mouth again.

Finally Zuko’s seemingly inexorable rhythm faltered, slowing and then speeding up for a few beats, and he grunted quietly just before his hips shuddered against her and he let himself collapse over her back. Katara pulled her mouth away from Aang’s to pant “Keep going,” and Zuko obeyed, driving his still-hard cock just at the right spot, so close… then Aang licked his first two fingers and reached under her to rub at her clit, so close to where her body was joined with Zuko’s that his other fingers were brushing the root of his cock.

Zuko slowed again and choked out “I can’t—” “It’s all right, I’ve got her,” said Aang, and the tension building low in her belly released in a warm flood just as Zuko’s softening cock slipped out, and they sighed their relief in unison.

For a minute or so, the three of them lay still, their limbs entangled, letting their breathing slow and calm. “I’ve missed you both,” Zuko finally said, his voice even hoarser than usual.

“Us too,” said Aang, fondly nudging Zuko’s leg with his foot.

They dragged themselves off the bed to clean up in the adjoining washroom, then collapsed back into the bed. Zuko was cocooned between Aang and Katara as usual when the three of them were together, so that Aang had space on one side to sprawl out like an octopus (with what always seemed like too many limbs), and so the boys could get up at dawn without waking Katara.

Also as usual, they were both asleep before her. She carefully propped herself up on her elbow to gaze at them fondly. Aang’s face was soft and relaxed, his mouth open with drool already starting to pool in the corner, while Zuko’s jaw remained tightly clenched even in sleep, and his arm was clutching Aang to his chest like a child with a treasured doll—or else like they were the only two survivors of a shipwreck. They shouldn’t have been that way, the last remnant of a murdered people with the whole world’s welfare resting on his shoulders, and the privileged son of royalty in the world’s wealthiest and most powerful empire… But if they hadn’t been the way they were—the one miraculously whole and resilient, the other scarred and bent under an enormous sense of responsibility—the world wouldn’t be at peace now, its terrible wounds on the way to healing, and neither would Katara.


	3. The Experiment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aang and Zuko conduct a preliminary experiment, and Zuko explains to Aang why he asked about the Avatar State in the first place. In Hamiltonian terms: "I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops, this got dark.

When he and Zuko woke at sunrise, Aang gently shook Katara’s shoulder to ask if she wanted to go with them to watch their ‘experiment.’ She stirred, her eyes barely open, and grumbled something mostly unintelligible, though the words “too early” stood out.

“All right,” Aang said, patting her head. It was just as well: she didn’t typically go out with him and Zuko for morning meditation and firebending exercises, and he wasn’t sure he wanted the rest of the house to suspect that something unusual was afoot.

He and Zuko put on the same casual clothes they wore for their usual exercises, and Zuko tied half of his hair back in a less pristine version of its standard topknot, then they went down to fetch Appa from the spacious stable yard. Ember Island was too small to find a place where the potential disruption caused by the Avatar State—a sudden burst of light, violent winds, tremors in the earth—would not be noticed. But Zuko informed Aang that they were just northeast of an arm of the main island that was only sparsely inhabited, and if they landed on the other side of a small range of hills, it would shield them from the view of all nearby settlements.

It took scarcely half an hour to reach the crest of the hills, and then they flew low down the northwest slopes, looking for a likely clearing. They found one partway down the hillside, beside a creek where spring wildflowers grew—mostly red, but with vivid patches of orange and blue that seemed almost to glow in the golden early-morning light. Aang landed Appa amid the wildflowers, where he could happily romp or graze, and walked with Zuko down to the creek—he wasn’t even sure why, but it felt right to go there. At the creek’s edge, they could catch glimpses of the sea to the north through the branches of the trees on the other side.

Aang sat in the lotus position beside the water and waved Zuko down along the bank until he was satisfied that he was far enough away to be safe. When Aang nodded his approval, Zuko sat cross-legged facing him to watch.

They had been lovers for long enough—over fourteen years, now; almost half of Aang’s (waking) life—that there shouldn’t have been anything they were ashamed to do in front of each other. Nonetheless, Aang felt foolish and self-conscious doing what he was about to do—or perhaps it was the Avatar Spirit before whom he was ashamed. It usually took half a minute to meditate into the Avatar State, but this time it took longer for Aang to quiet his doubt and embarrassment enough to find the Spirit within himself and step into it, dissolving the boundary between its living energy and his own, becoming one with it.

When he was in the Avatar State, everything looked different: the shapes and colors around him were sharper and more vivid; each flower, each blade of grass, seemed to hum with its own life, softly singing its memories of sunshine and rain and the sweet, rich earth that fed it with the flesh and bones of its ancestors; the creek sang of rain and melted snow that remembered living in the ocean before the sun called it to the sky and then the wind sent it down again to rejoin the ocean.

Aang turned his sharpened, heightened vision to Zuko, and he could not hear his friend’s thoughts the way he could hear the plants and the water—human thoughts were sealed away in their own independent spirits—but he could effortlessly hear Zuko’s heartbeat through the earth, quickened with anticipation bordering on arousal, and an undercurrent of fear. The fear did not mute or inhibit the arousal, as Aang might have expected (as it _should_ have, something in his mind said), but instead seemed to sharpen it.

Aang could feel the blood rushing through Zuko’s veins in time with his racing heartbeat, as easily as Katara must be able to feel it on nights when the moon was full, even though the moon was now only a crescent-shaped ghost above the horizon. Aang could feel how easy it would be to take hold of that blood and bend it, bend Zuko’s body, to his will. He didn’t usually find the knowledge, the _feeling_ of his power so appealing (certainly not as much as Katara did)… but he could feel in Zuko’s blood and heartbeat, in the way fear mingled with arousal, how _he_ desired Aang’s power, and it called out not only to Aang’s love and desire for his friend, but to an ancient, primal force whose desire for control, and desire to pacify Zuko’s desire, mingled with his own.

The surge of desire, in himself and in the Spirit awakened within him, overcame any lingering embarrassment about his intentions. Aang rose to his knees so that he could unlace his trousers and draw out his stiffening cock. He began to stroke himself almost absentmindedly, letting habit and instinct guide his hand, while he fixed his gaze and his heightened focus on Zuko, hearing how his heartbeat jumped and then quickened further, feeling the blood that surged into his groin, almost as if it were his own.

And it _was_ his own, too; need and its satisfaction were growing together as his hand worked, and the sensation was heightened like every other by his sense of connection to all of the life around him. The song of the creek water grew louder, more turbulent, as it started to lap against the bank where Aang knelt, bent to the strength of his pleasure and desire even as it still rushed to obey the summons of the ocean below. His pleasure was the pleasure of life sustaining itself by creating new life, the pleasure that the trees and wildflowers knew when bees, butterflies, and sunbirds came down to drink from them and to carry their pollen to the next that they visited. He closed his eyes briefly to feel their pleasure as his, his pleasure as theirs, as if his body did not stop at the edge of his skin but extended to encompass the whole meadow, the whole hillside, or farther still.

But his pleasure, unlike that of wildflowers and trees, could be separated from the continuation of his body’s life and joined to his spirit’s love for another spirit. He opened his eyes again to fix the whole of his attention on Zuko, shutting out the tempest of colors, sounds, and feelings that clamored for his notice. Zuko seemed to have felt the way Aang’s focus turned to him, because he drew in a sudden sharp breath and his heartbeat, which had been leveling out, picked up again, while blood rushed even faster up to his face and down between his legs. His right eye widened and both pupils abruptly dilated with that strange combination of fear and hunger: the golden eyes of a wolf or an eagle-hawk, a hunter’s eyes, but with the look of the squirrel-deer they hunted… no—still of a hunter, but one that hunted not for prey, but for its own predator.

Aang, or something in him, had the impulse to go to Zuko and give him what he wanted… but he held himself back; the part of his mind that was still firmly his own knew he had to stay at a prudent distance until he proved that he could safely maintain control during sexual activity in the Avatar State. So he just kept moving his hand in firm, swift strokes, feeling his own nerves humming, his heart pounding, his blood rushing, with the same keen attunement as he felt Zuko’s, almost as if his body were someone else’s—just another vessel of water and energy for him to bend, like the creek that yearned toward him just as Zuko’s blood did, a strange luminous moon creating his own new tides.

He felt the air stirring around him, carrying some of the heat from his flushed skin, and the earth thrummed in time with his pulse and the movements of his hand. Warmth was building deep in his belly, a forest fire still smoldering under dead leaves and fallen branches, needing only a breath of air to burst into open flame. The wind around him was growing stronger, reaching far enough to start ruffling the long hair that fell past Zuko’s shoulders.

Aang couldn’t tell exactly what pushed him to it, but at last Zuko also rose to his knees and reached into his trousers to take himself in his hand. For an instant his eyes squeezed shut while his mouth opened in a sigh of relief, but then he opened his eyes again, his lips still parted for his gasping breaths, his gaze fixed as intently on Aang as Aang’s was on him.

That was enough to push Aang over the edge. He had had orgasms so intense that he saw stars burst behind his eyelids, sometimes powerful enough to turn his whole field of vision white; but even that experience could not hold a candle to this. The closest comparison he could reach for was when he had been enveloped in the maelstrom of many-colored fire by the dragon masters Ran and Shaw—he and Zuko together. The fire was within as well as around him, and in it he felt, as he had then, the power to give and to take life, the pulsing heartbeat of the living world, whose secret was that life and death were not opposed, but held in harmonious balance like the push and pull of moon and tides. Each small death had the potential to create new life.

Gradually the fire receded from Aang’s vision, the roar of wind subsided, the thrum of earth stilled. He came back to himself, and only himself; the Avatar Spirit retreated inside him. He was still kneeling by the creek’s edge, his hand now sticky and glistening with his seed, which he wiped off on the grass beside him. And Zuko was kneeling several body-lengths away along the bank, his cheeks flushed and hair wildly askew, one hand still down his trousers and the other now supporting himself on the ground in front of him.

Aang rose and went to sit beside him. “Let me,” he said, and eased Zuko back to lean against him, half in his lap, while he reached down to gently replace Zuko’s hand with his own.

All of Aang’s senses felt dimmed or muted now, as they always did after he left the Avatar State, and the world seemed paler, quieter, and farther away—as if his merely human body trapped him behind paper walls and glass windows, while the Avatar Spirit allowed him to reach directly into the substance of things. He could feel Zuko’s rapid heartbeat against his chest, could feel the heat of his body—elevated even from the height typical of a firebender—radiating through all the layers of clothing between them, and almost searing in his hand. But he could no longer feel the blood flowing through the rivers of his body, could not sense the balance of fear and desire in the precise cadence of his heartbeat, or the candle-flame of life that burned at his core, brighter and hotter than those of the flowers, insects, and birds all around them, but no less fragile, no less easily extinguished.

Love welled up in him at the memory of that bright, ephemeral flame. While his right hand continued its firm, steady strokes, he reached with his left hand to pull Zuko’s head against his shoulder and tenderly combed his fingers through the tangles that the wind had made in his fine hair. As Zuko’s breathing turned harsher and he started to thrust up into Aang’s fist, he slid his other hand under Zuko’s chin to tip his face upward so that he could bend down to kiss him—lightly at first, gently, until Zuko’s mouth grasped hungrily at his, teeth nipping at his lower lip, his tongue seeking contact just as his hips did. His whole body convulsed when he came, pulling his lips away to gasp for air, the expression on his face almost pained.

“Are you all right?” Aang asked him as he came down, still breathing hard.

“Yes, of course,” he said breathlessly. “You?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I think that went well,” said Zuko. “Some high winds and the ground shook a little, but you kept it pretty well-contained.”

“Yeah,” Aang agreed, but with doubt in his voice.

“You don’t sound convinced,” Zuko remarked. “Are you worried that you’ll have more trouble if you’re actually in contact with another person?”

“It’s not that, exactly…” Aang resumed finger-combing tangles out of Zuko’s hair; it gave him something to do with some of his nervous energy.

“What is it, then?” Zuko asked, frowning up at him.

“When I was in the Avatar State, I could read your heartbeat so precisely that I could almost sense what you were feeling. And I could feel that you were afraid.”

Zuko laughed softly through his nose. “That’s just good sense. I’d be stupid not to be a little bit afraid.”

“But… it wasn’t just caution, or hesitation, which would have gotten in the way of… the other things you were feeling. It was _fear_ , and it… excited you.”

Zuko shrugged. “I did say the danger was a little thrilling, didn’t I?”

Aang made a frustrated sound in his throat. “I feel like you’re not telling me everything. About why you want this, I mean.”

Zuko sighed. Aang could almost hear him thinking, debating with himself how honest to be, even without the Avatar State to hone his senses.

“I’ve been close to death… many times,” he said finally, which was already enough for Aang to know that he had decided on honesty. “The first time I can remember, I was three, and I almost drowned trying to save a turtle-crab from a hawk. My father saved me then, but… I didn’t find out until later that the first time, it was my father who almost killed me. When I was nine, he told me that when I was born, and he didn’t see the firebender’s spark in my eyes, he wanted to ‘cast me from the palace.’ At the time, I thought he meant he would send me to an orphanage, to be raised by Fire Sages or adopted by commoners. But later I realized that he would never be so careless as to leave a child of royal blood alive, even a non-bending child, to become a rival for the throne.”

“Spirits, Zuko, I… I’m so sorry. You told us about the ‘spark’ thing, but…”

“It isn’t anymore, but it used to be common in the Fire Nation to leave unwanted children to die of exposure: children born sick or weak, or with deformities, or that the family just couldn’t afford to feed… and sometimes non-bending children in the royal family. I was lucky to be born, lucky to live past childhood. I was lucky that I didn’t die of the burns my father gave me, or the infections that followed. And then, when I first captured you at the South Pole, and you rose in a whirlpool out of the ocean with glowing eyes and fury in your face and swept me off the ship with a great wave… I didn’t even know it was you at the heart of the Ocean Spirit that destroyed half of the Northern Fleet, but my uncle told me afterward, and as we sailed past the wreckage of our ships, I felt again how close I had come to death. How easily you could have killed me if you had wanted to… but instead you saved my life. Again.”

Guilt stabbed at Aang’s chest when he thought of all the Fire Nation sailors he had enabled La to kill; he still did not know, and did not want to know, how many. “But… I don’t understand,” he said. “Why…”

Zuko just kept talking as if Aang hadn’t interrupted, gazing straight ahead, his eyes distant. “The most recent time I _truly_ thought I might die was in Yu Dao, a year after the war ended; none of the later assassination attempts got that close. I asked you for a way out, and twice—when you went into the Avatar State—I thought you might give me what I’d asked for. I wasn’t sure I still wanted it, but… do you know what it felt like?”

“You said you felt relief,” Aang said apprehensively. “When we both had that dream where I…”

“It felt like the release of an unbearable tension,” said Zuko. “My mind went mercifully blank. It was almost… bliss.”

“Zuko, please tell me you’re not still looking for… ‘a way out,’” Aang begged him.

“I’m not,” Zuko assured him firmly, finally looking up to meet his eyes. “I want to stay alive. I have so much work still to do to try to repair some of the damage my father and grandfathers did to my nation and to the world. I have a family now, and I love them—and that includes you and Katara and Bumi. I don’t want to leave any of you.”

“But…?”

Zuko sighed again, and once more his gaze grew distant. “But I still remember how it felt. That relief, that joy, that _peace_. It… it haunts me, sometimes, the memory, that feeling. And I still feel it sometimes, when I think about… you know. ‘The call of the void,’ and all that.”

“The what?”

“No, I guess airbenders wouldn’t have that expression, would they? Or it wouldn’t mean the same thing. It’s when you’re up high somewhere, on a clifftop or a balcony or something, and you have the fleeting thought that you want to jump off. Without a glider, obviously.”

Aang blinked. “That is very strange. And no, we don’t— didn’t have that concept.”

“Well, anyway, it’s a thing in the Fire Nation. But I think I feel it more than most, even if there are a lot of people who feel it sometimes. Maybe because I’ve so often been so close, or because there _have_ been times when I’ve just… wanted so badly to _rest_.”

“I still don’t understand,” said Aang, trying to keep his voice from trembling. “You don’t want me to— to end your life. Do you want me to hurt you in some other way? Because I won’t. Not… not for real. Little sparks are one thing, but…” Now Aang was thinking that he would never again accede to Zuko’s request to deprive him of air, even temporarily.

Zuko reached up to grab the hand that had paused in combing through his hair and was now resting on his shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “No, I don’t want you to hurt me, either.”

“Then why…?” Aang trailed off helplessly.

Zuko paused, stroking his fingers over the back of Aang’s hand. “I don’t completely understand it either, but I think… I think I just want to _do_ something with that memory, that feeling of relief. To… let it go, perhaps, or at any rate, turn it into something else.”

Aang chewed over this idea for a few silent moments. Zuko was still gently stroking his hand, and Aang wrapped his other arm around Zuko’s chest. “And you think this will help you do that? Let it go?” Aang asked quietly, at last.

“Maybe. I hope so.”

Aang was silent again, thinking about everything Zuko had said. He felt Zuko’s back tense against him and his heartbeat quicken again as he anxiously waited for his answer.

“All right,” Aang said, finally. Zuko let out a long, slow breath and his heartbeat began to slow again. “But I want to talk to Katara first,” he warned. “I think she should know.”

“Of course,” said Zuko.

“And… I think you should tell Mai, too.”

Zuko sighed. “Probably.”

“I’d like Katara to be there, when we try it,” said Aang. “Tonight, if you want.”

“In case of a medical emergency?” Zuko asked, sounding amused.

Aang was less amused. “Well, yes, there’s that. But also… she’s the one who I know can bring me _out_ of the Avatar State if… if things go wrong. If I lose control.”

Zuko nodded. “I understand.”

Zuko sat up away from Aang’s chest to rise to his feet, and Aang followed. They both re-laced their trousers and checked each other for incriminating stains; Aang found one drying on Zuko’s tunic and bent some water from the creek to wash it out. Then they walked back up the hill into the field where Appa was dozing.

Zuko was about to climb back into Appa’s saddle when Aang caught his hand.

“Please don’t… listen to the void,” Aang said, his voice plaintive.

“I won’t,” said Zuko. “I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided French expressions are from the Fire Nation, right? Well, they have _l'appel du vide_ , too...


	4. The Reason

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko explains the reasoning behind his request first to Katara and then to Mai, who are less than thrilled; the family goes on an outing in town on Ember Island.

When Katara woke up about an hour after dawn, Aang and Zuko had not yet returned. That wasn’t unusual, yet. The sound of high-pitched voices and occasional giggles and shrieks let her know that the kids were already awake. She got dressed and went downstairs, where Mai and Ty Lee (who was off duty today and could spend the day with them just as a friend, and then some) were simultaneously working on making breakfast and making sure the kids didn’t hurt themselves or anything else.

Katara joined them in the kitchen. While Ty Lee made rice and set out dishes on the kitchen table, Mai cut up pickled vegetables and then brewed tea. Katara made a seaweed salad that was more in the Water Tribe than the Fire Nation style—which is to say, with many fewer hot peppers. (They had not brought a live-in cook from the palace, for obvious reasons; they hired a local woman to cook dinner for them, but otherwise prepared all their meals themselves. Most of the Fire Nation nobility would have found this shockingly undignified… but what could you expect from the influence of a lowly Water Tribe peasant?)

Breakfast was ready and the women and children sat down to eat not quite two hours after Aang and Zuko had left, and they still had not returned. Mai and Ty Lee kept directing curious looks at Katara, and she tried to communicate _‘I’ll explain later’_ with just her facial expressions.

“Where’s Daddy and Uncle Zuko?” Bumi asked, unfortunately with his mouth full of rice, about five minutes after they’d started eating. Katara used a napkin to catch the half-chewed rice that fell down his front.

“Where Daddy?” Izumi echoed, impressed, as always, with everything Bumi said and did.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Bumi,” said Katara. “And your fathers went out exploring this morning. They should be back soon.”

“What’s asploring?” Bumi wanted to know.

“ _Exploring_ means they’re going to places they haven’t been before to see what they’re like.”

“I like asploring!” Bumi declared.

“Me too!” Izumi chimed in.

“Yes, I know,” Mai said dryly. Baby Izumi’s penchant for disappearing when her caretaker had turned away for just a few seconds and then turning up in the kitchens or the servants’ quarters or (on one memorable occasion) the stables was a large part of how she had earned the nickname ‘Zooms.’

Aang and Zuko finally traipsed in, looking mildly disheveled, more than two hours after they had left, when their families were just finishing breakfast.

“Where _have_ you two been?” Ty Lee asked, in a loud tone of exasperated relief that betrayed the anxiety she had otherwise been concealing quite well (understandable, considering that Zuko’s safety was her professional responsibility).

“We took Appa out for a bit of flying,” Aang said breezily. “Found some nice quiet spots on the main island just west of here. Gorgeous scenery.”

“Windy too, apparently,” Mai remarked, fixing a critical eye on Zuko’s hair. With a sheepish, self-conscious look, he reached up to straighten it out.

“Mai, why don’t you and Ty Lee take the kids down to the beach for a little while? I’ll stay here and make sure these two eat something.” Katara was curious enough about how the ‘experiment’ had gone that she would have made the suggestion even if Aang hadn’t given her a look that clearly meant _‘We need to talk.’_

Mai and Ty Lee both cast suspicious glances among the three of them; it was obvious that something odd was going on. _“We’ll talk later,”_ Zuko mouthed at Mai over the heads of the oblivious toddlers. Mai gave a slight nod, then she wiped away the grains of rice and strands of seaweed stuck to Izumi’s face and helped her stand up. Ty Lee extended a hand to Bumi to help him up as well, and he started running out the door as soon as he was upright, yelling enthusiastically. Izumi attempted to run after him, much more slowly and unsteadily, while Mai walked close behind her.

Katara poured herself more tea and sipped it slowly while Aang and Zuko helped themselves to breakfast. Once they were settled and had started eating, she cleared her throat and said, “So I see you’re both still in one piece.”

Zuko exhaled a small laugh through his nose. “Yes,” Aang confirmed. “That part went fine.”

“‘That part’?”

“You know. The, uh, physical part.”

Katara had more questions about how, precisely, it had gone, but there was obviously something more pressing on Aang’s mind. “And what is the other part that, I gather, didn’t go so well?”

Aang and Zuko exchanged a look; Katara thought Zuko’s expression had a subtle plea in it. “It’s not exactly that it didn’t go well…” said Aang. “It’s… I asked Zuko why he wanted this—the _real_ reason. And he told me.”

“What is the real reason?” Katara asked quietly, looking straight at Zuko.

He told her, mostly looking down at the table instead of meeting her eyes, fidgeting with various items on the table in front of him. When he told her how his father had wanted to kill him as an infant, Katara had to put down her teacup because she had unconsciously heated the liquid inside so much that it became painful to hold. When he recounted how the burn his father inflicted had nearly killed him, Aang put a hand over the hand nearest to him and gripped it tightly, stilling its nervous fiddling with chopsticks.

After he finished, there was a long silence while Katara digested the explanation, now looking down at her own teacup. Finally, she looked back up, not at Zuko, but at Aang.

“And you’re willing to help with this?” she asked him, careful to keep her tone level and straightforward, not disapproving or incredulous.

“Yes,” said Aang, meeting her eyes seriously.

“And you’re… completely okay with it?” she asked, letting a little bit of skepticism into her voice.

Aang sighed. “I wish it weren’t necessary,” was all he said.

“You’ve come close to dying many times, too,” she pointed out to him. “Not just close: you _were_ dead. You had died, and the spirit water brought you back to life. But you don’t need anything like this. You’ve never asked Zuko to… to hit you with a big bolt of lightning, or attack you with firebending.”

“Except when we’re playing ‘capture the Avatar,’” Aang said with a sly glance at Zuko. Zuko allowed him a tiny smile—his first since they had come back.

“That’s different,” she insisted. “It’s obviously a game; you know it’s a game. You know there’s no actual danger. There might be some… suspense, but there’s no actual _fear_.”

“I know,” said Aang.

“Then why is this necessary?” she asked, now sounding a bit plaintive herself, looking between her boys, the men she loved.

“I don’t know,” Zuko said quietly, looking down again.

“Different people deal with things differently,” Aang said in his warm, sympathetic ‘wise Avatar’ voice, which tended to raise Katara’s hackles. “You and Sokka responded very differently to your grief over losing your mother…”

“He didn’t deal with his at all,” she replied testily.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Aang said, still gentle and reasonable. “I think he dealt with it in his own way, but you didn’t recognize it because it wouldn’t have worked for you.”

“And how have _you_ dealt with your brushes with death?” she asked Aang. “Other than having nightmares, I mean.”

“I’ve meditated,” he said. “I’ve asked my past lives about dying—which is something most people can’t do.” One side of his mouth rose in a wry half-smile. “But that’s not the only difference here,” he said, looking back at Zuko, who looked up at him but not at Katara. “I’ve never had the experience of… of _welcoming_ death. I went into the fight with Ozai _accepting_ that death was a likely outcome, and at peace with that in a way… but I never _wanted_ to. Releasing your attachments to the world isn’t the same as being glad to leave it.”

“And that’s how you felt?” Katara asked, turning back toward Zuko. “Glad to leave the world?”

He looked back up at her, and the intensity of his gaze—which somehow seemed to accentuate its strange asymmetry, the way one eye was permanently narrower than the other—made _her_ want to look away, as he so often did. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he said. His tone was firm and even, but there was a shadow of bitterness beneath it. “The planet has been trying to throw me off ever since I was born, and I’ve been fighting tooth and nail to stay on it, clawing my way back whenever it’s almost succeeded… but for what? I never knew what my purpose was for being here; everything I did always felt wrong. Everything I did _was_ wrong, until the day of the eclipse, and even after that, I kept getting it wrong. Everywhere I turned, I heard people telling me I was wrong—not just my actions, but _me_ , my existence. That I should be dead. Don’t you think you’d start to believe them?”

“I should have been dead, too,” Katara argued, anger flaring in her stomach. “I should have been killed instead of my mother. And Aang too— _your great-grandfather_ slaughtered a whole nation just for the purpose of killing him.”

“Katara, don’t,” Aang said, low and fretful. Of course he would—a pacifist never wanted to confront people with hard truths.

“We’ve all had hard lives; we’ve all spent most of them fighting to stay alive. But Aang and I don’t spend our time wallowing in self-pity about how the world hates us and always wanted us dead. And we _certainly_ don’t ask people who love us to put us in danger and then _lie to them_ about why.”

“And what was my incentive for telling the truth, if this is the response I would get?” Zuko finally snapped in return, his eyes flashing.

“ _Incentive?_ You don’t need an _incentive_ to tell the truth to the people you love! You just _do it!”_

“How would I know that? My family did nothing _but_ lie, and whenever I told too much truth, I paid for it.” He put his hand to his scarred cheek, pointed to his misshapen eye. “ _This_ was the price for telling the truth.”

“We’re not your father!” Katara shouted back, slamming a hand down on the table.

“Stop it, both of you!” Aang cried out, jostling the dishes on the table as he abruptly stood up. “Katara, it’s not a contest about whose life has been the hardest.”

“I didn’t say it was!” she objected.

“Not in so many words,” Zuko retorted bitterly.

 _“Stop!”_ Aang roared in a voice that didn’t quite sound like his, and a tongue of flame burst from his mouth above their heads. Katara thought she briefly saw a faint white glow behind his eyes. She and Zuko both fell quiet.

Aang closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, then sat down again, in half-lotus rather than _seiza_. “Katara,” he said. “What are you really angry about?”

She glared across the table at Zuko, who gave her a stormy look in return. “I’m angry because _he_ has no right to ask _you_ to put him in danger just because he can’t deal with the fact that his life has been hard.”

“That’s not what I—” Zuko started to protest, but Aang silenced him with a warning look.

“He has _no right_ to say that he wanted out of life just because it’s been hard. Our lives have been hard, too, and we’ve never wanted to just _quit_ and leave everyone else to clean up the mess.”

“That’s not fair,” Aang said in that gentle-and-reasonable voice again.

“No, what’s _not fair_ is deciding you’re tired of putting up with life and you want to die, and who cares about the people you leave behind to deal with their grief or their guilt about the fact that you _asked them to kill you?”_ All of a sudden her nose was prickling and tears were welling in her eyes. She hated her tendency to start crying when she got really angry; it just encouraged stupid _men_ to think she was a weak, emotional _woman_ that they didn’t have to take seriously.

“That’s not what I’m asking anymore!”

“Katara… you _were_ the one who encouraged me to make that promise,” Aang reminded her, and now there was a hint of reproach in his oh-so-reasonable tone.

“I didn’t think he _meant it!”_

“All of that was sixteen years ago. If you were still mad at me about it, why didn’t you say anything?” Zuko asked, still agitated but not shouting anymore.

“I— I didn’t know I was. I thought all that was behind us. But now you’re saying it’s not, and you still need Aang to do this for you because sixteen years ago you almost died and you were glad about it?”

“It’s not something you just _get over_. You don’t know what it felt like.”

“No, I don’t! Because I would never do that— _willingly_ leave behind the people I love!”

“Even if they would be better off without you?”

“That’s not your decision to make!”

“No, it wasn’t,” Zuko agreed, his voice tightly controlled.

“And you don’t force _them_ to make the decision for you, either!”

“Whose decision is it, then?”

“No one’s! You don’t give up on life! You keep living until it kills you, and when you have to go, you go kicking and screaming!” The tears had escaped from the corners of her eyes before she could stop them; she angrily wiped them away, then swiped the back of her hand under her nose to catch the stream of snot. Ugh, she was as gross as her three-year-old.

 _“I know that!”_ Zuko shouted, and now there was steam coming out of his nose. Aang had either given up on keeping them from fighting, or thought there was some benefit to letting the fight play out. “I told you, I _don’t_ want to die anymore. I _don’t_ want to leave you, or Izumi, or Mai.”

“Then why do you need to relive the moment when you did? Why _now?”_

Zuko put his elbows on the table and rested his forehead on his fingertips. “I’ve been having dreams about it recently, though I hadn’t in… ten years, or close to it. It started again when Izumi was born. Not that often; once or twice a month, maybe. But the feeling from the dream has a tendency to bleed into my waking mind. I’ll get flashes of memory sometimes, during the day, unexpectedly. It’s… unnerving, to say the least.”

“It _started_ when Izumi was born?” Katara asked incredulously. “In La’s name, why? She gives you more reason than ever to want— to _need_ to stay alive.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Zuko snapped, glaring at her through his fingers.

“I think that _is_ why,” Aang said softly, breaking a long, thoughtful silence. “I think you’re more afraid of dying than you’ve ever been… so you’re afraid of the memory of when you weren’t.”

“That… makes a lot of sense,” Zuko said slowly.

“But you’re _not_ going to… to do anything stupid and irresponsible,” Katara protested, her voice shaking with what felt oddly like relief. “Other than this, I mean.”

Zuko exhaled another small laugh of acknowledgment and rubbed at his eyes. “I don’t plan to. I don’t _want_ to. But those flashes of memory, those leftover feelings from the dreams… they bring thoughts with them. About how I’m living on borrowed time, and ending my existence would be setting something _right_ —restoring balance to the world, so to speak. Or that the only time in my life I can remember not feeling tired was when I thought I’d never have to fight again.”

“‘The call of the void,’” Aang said, puzzlingly, and Zuko nodded.

“And… you think having Aang fuck you in the Avatar State will stop you from having the dreams—or stop you from acting on those thoughts?” Katara asked, still skeptical.

“I don’t know. But I thought it might help to… to give the dream a different ending. To change the significance of the feelings, by directing them toward… a different kind of release. If that makes any sense at all.”

“It makes sense to me,” Aang said quietly. He cracked a small smile. “It helped when I told the Ozai in my dreams that _he_ wasn’t wearing any pants.”

Zuko made a bemused, mildly disgusted face. “I hope the images weren’t too detailed…”

Now Katara buried her face in her hands, scrubbing at the tear-tracks, thinking it over. When she lifted her head, she said, “I just want to be sure we’re not making it worse by… by helping you get off on the fantasy of your own death.”

Zuko paused with a small thoughtful frown before he spoke. “Even if that is a part of it,” he said slowly, carefully, “I’d like to have a safe outlet for that impulse.”

“And this is a _safe_ outlet?” Katara asked, incredulous once more.

“Relatively,” he said.

“That’s why I— _we_ —want to have you there,” Aang said. “To heal any injuries, in case there’s an accident… but also to pull me out of the Avatar State if necessary.” He paused, then added, “And we’ll both be there to pull Zuko out of it if he… goes someplace dark.”

Katara looked from one of her boys to the other (her men, now, she had to remind herself), at their serious faces, and was struck anew by how fiercely she loved and wanted to protect them—even from themselves. “Fine,” she said. “I’m still not happy about it, but I’ll do what I can to keep you both safe.”

“Thank you, Katara,” Aang said, turning toward her those soft, earnest gray eyes that had never failed to melt her heart since the moment he opened them and asked her to go penguin-sledding with him.

Katara looked across the table at Zuko, whose lips were still pressed tightly together with defensive anxiety. “Thank you,” he said, more quietly, a little stiffly. “For understanding.”

Somehow Zuko’s stiffness managed to melt her just as effectively as Aang’s earnestness. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice as quiet and strained as his; it was hard for either of them to admit they were wrong, strong-willed and stubborn as they both were. “I shouldn’t have said— some of the things I said. I was just… afraid of losing you. But it was easier to be angry.”

Zuko nodded, still a touch stiff, but the line of his mouth softened. “I think part of me knew that,” he said.

At that moment Mai and Ty Lee came back in with the children. They took in the scene—the solemn faces, Katara’s streaked with dried tears; Aang and Zuko’s half-eaten breakfasts—and attempted to lead their charges past the table and up the stairs, but Bumi and Izumi had other ideas.

Bumi ran over to Aang, shouting, “Daddy, go on air scooter!”

“You want to go on an air scooter? We can’t do that inside or we’ll make a mess.”

“Go outside!” Bumi triumphantly concluded.

“Tell you what, Bumi. I need to finish breakfast now and get washed up and dressed to go into town. But you can go on an air scooter on our way there. Deal?”

“Air scooter now!” Bumi insisted, at near-deafening volume.

Aang gave Katara a pleading look; she informed him with a wry smirk that he was on his own.

“Hey Bumi, you want me to teach you how to walk on your hands?” Ty Lee offered brightly.

“Yeah!” Bumi cried, and followed her back outside. She turned and winked at Aang before she went out the door, and he put his hands together and bowed his fervent thanks.

Izumi, meanwhile, toddled quietly over to Zuko and bumped into his elbow head-first, like a friendly ferret-cat. He scooped her onto his lap and held her stable with one arm while he resumed eating breakfast with the other hand (his left; his ambidexterity had turned out to be useful for juggling small children).

“Do you three have something you want to tell me?” Mai asked, her tone carefully mild and casual, clearly trusting that Izumi would be oblivious to what was going on.

“I’ll talk to you after we get back from town this evening,” Zuko promised.

Mai didn’t look satisfied, but she nodded. “Do you have business you need to settle with each other?” she asked, meaning, _‘Should I take the kid?’_

“Briefly, yes,” said Zuko.

Mai nodded again and held out a hand. “Come on, Izumi. Let’s go see how Ty Lee is doing with teaching Bumi circus tricks.”

Izumi clung more tightly to Zuko’s arm and looked up at him questioningly. He gently set her down from his lap and said, “Go with Mama, Izumi. Go see Bumi and Ty Lee.”

Izumi toddled back over to Mai, still quiet. Katara wondered if she sensed that all was not well with her father.

When they had gone back outside, Aang said quietly, “We were thinking about doing it tonight, in the same place where we went this morning.”

“We have another couple of days here,” said Katara, her voice still a little unsteady. “I’d rather wait until tomorrow night, if that’s all right.”

Zuko nodded. “Of course. That’s fairer to Mai, too.”

Aang and Zuko finished eating, mostly in silence, then went upstairs to prepare themselves for being seen in public. Zuko was not wearing his formal robes of office—aside from the fact that he was on vacation, it was too damned hot—but the looser, lighter robe he wore still had long sleeves: even on vacation, it was improper for a nobleman of his age to publicly bare his arms. Aang, on the other hand, re-donned the one-shouldered kashaya he had been wearing at their private beach house, which he had largely stopped wearing in public as a member of the United Republic’s governing Council; he wasn’t in charge here, so he might as well be comfortable. Meanwhile, Mai and Katara scrubbed their children clean of the remnants of breakfast and the damp sand that somehow managed to get everywhere and dressed them neatly to go into Ember Island’s small city center.

As promised, Aang allowed Bumi—and Izumi too, for the sake of fairness—to ride on air scooters part of the way into town. They were escorted not only by Ty Lee—who was officially off duty but never let her watchfulness drop—but also by two of the elite, mostly female guard corps she had recruited and trained.

Once they reached the town center, the children were awed by the many street performers busking for the spare coppers of passersby: musicians, jugglers, sleight-of-hand illusionists, eerily still mimes… Zuko bestowed his largesse liberally, even giving a full silver coin to a pair of athletic dancers in colorful whirling silks whose routine had Izumi staring, mouth agape, then laughing and clapping in wild delight. They faltered for the first time in their performance when they saw how much he had given and who had given it, then bowed low before him, stammering thanks and apologies for their unworthiness. “Anyone who brings my daughter joy is worthy of that and more,” he said, prompting another spate of bowing and thanks.

In place of an organized midday meal they snacked on whatever morsels caught their fancy among the many food stalls that lined the streets—most of them meat-based, to Aang’s annoyance (though he was able to find some vegetable dumplings, meat-free noodle dishes, and even a char-grilled tofu skewer), and many of them spicier than Katara could handle (she handed her discards off to Zuko, Mai, or Ty Lee), though Bumi proved admirably tolerant of Fire Nation spice levels.

They stopped at the arcade that Zuko, Mai, and Ty Lee recalled visiting with Azula (who was still confined to an isolated mountain convent, though no longer in an asylum). They had shown it to Aang and Katara before, of course—they had all been to Ember Island together many times over the past decade and a half—and Bumi and Izumi were still too young to play any of the games, but they watched avidly as the adults struck targets either with bending or with balls provided by the arcade (not quite like throwing knives, Mai remarked, but close enough) and took turns pointing to the prize they wanted when one of their parents won. They left with several more stuffed animal toys than they had arrived with: a tiger-monkey and a fluffy koala-sheep for Izumi; a fierce-looking tigerdillo and an enormous red dragon for Bumi, which Aang held tucked under his arm because it was almost as big as its new owner.

Everywhere they went, Katara kept a watchful eye out for signs of hostility or danger, one hand resting lightly on her skin of bending water when it wasn’t otherwise occupied. She noticed a few people directing glares at either Aang or Zuko (or both), most of them older or at least middle-aged; one rough-looking man spat on the ground as they approached, but casually enough, and at enough distance, that none of them could be sure it was intentional (Katara and Mai were far more certain that it was than their more forgiving husbands).

But for the most part, Katara was happily surprised to find, their reception was warm, admiring, even reverent. People’s eyes lit up with delighted amazement before they hurriedly bowed; some teenage girls squealed over their unbelievable good fortune after the handsome young Fire Lord and his handsome young friend the Avatar passed by. One young man, blushing and stammering amid his bows toward Zuko and Mai, asked Aang _and_ Katara if they would sign his copy of a book about the end of the Hundred-Year War (and would they address it to Ru Wen? _Oh his Agni)_. Clearly he didn’t dare to ask such a favor of the Fire Lord and Lady, but Aang handed the book and the brush to Zuko anyway, and he passed it on to Mai and Ty Lee, who also signed, the one with a tiny tolerant smile and slight eye-roll, the other with a bright gracious smile and a wink.

The highlight of the afternoon was a an abridged production of _Love Amongst the Dragons_ , performed on an outdoor stage by a puppet theater troupe whose mission was to introduce young children to the classics of Fire Nation drama (unaffiliated with the Ember Island Players, Katara and Aang were relieved to learn). Zuko’s security team had coordinated their visit with the troupe beforehand; seats in the middle of the front row, on silk cushions rather than the standard straw mats, were reserved for the Fire Lord’s family and friends. Ty Lee and their guard escorts sat behind Zuko and Mai, while three other members of her team patrolled the edges of the audience.

Before the play began, the leader of the troupe asked Zuko if he would like to address the crowd. He shook his head, but she insisted, so he just stood up, turned toward the audience, and said, “I won’t bore you with some political nonsense when you’ve come for art. Thank you to Ember Island Puppet Classic Theater for their hospitality, and on with the show!”

As Katara could have predicted, Bumi’s attention started to wander barely a quarter through the hour-long show, and soon so did he. Katara (who enjoyed this kind of thing less than Aang did) got up as discreetly as possible, given that she was sitting with the Fire Lord’s party in the front row, to take Bumi’s hand and lead him to the side of the audience, where he could wander around without blocking anyone’s view. Katara followed him to make sure he didn’t run off and get lost, gently herding him back toward the theater if he started to go astray… but she kept turning her gaze back, not toward the stage, but toward where her husband and lover sat.

Zuko was holding Izumi on his lap, and she was watching with the same rapt attention she had given to all the other marvels of the day. Zuko was almost as engrossed in the show as she was, though he sometimes showed signs of dissatisfaction, perhaps when the abbreviated production left out or oversimplified some plot point he considered important. But he also kept glancing down at Izumi to see how she was reacting, and his whole face lit up every time he took in her wide, shining eyes and her mouth open with laughter or awe. Katara could scarcely remember seeing Zuko so happy in all the years she had known him.

Mai, beside him, was allotting her attention in about the inverse of Zuko’s: she occasionally glanced up at the stage, probably as a token gesture to avoid offending the actors, but for the most part she was watching her husband and daughter with as much warmth in her eyes as Katara had ever seen, but a strange hint of sadness as well. Meanwhile, Aang, on Zuko’s other side, was mostly watching the show with a milder version of Zuko’s emotional investment, but also looked around every once in a while to see where Bumi and Katara were, meeting her eyes with a nod of thanks every time he found them—and also looked over at Zuko and Izumi probably more often than Mai looked at the stage. When Katara could see his expression, it was thoughtful, and full of the same sadness-tinged warmth as Mai’s. He kept abortively lifting his hand as if he wanted to place it on his lover’s hand or his back, then hurriedly pulling it back to rest on his lap when he remembered that he could not.

After the show, there was a flurry of bowing and thanks between Zuko and the actors; then, once Zuko managed to extricate himself, they made their way back toward the beach house. The children were thoroughly worn out from the day’s excitement: halfway back, Bumi complained that he was too tired to walk, and Aang passed his stuffed dragon prize to Katara so that he could carry their child; Zuko picked Izumi up when her steps began to waver before they had made it to the edge of town, and she was sound asleep against his shoulder by the time they got home.

The parents put their children to bed for their late-afternoon nap, then, without really discussing it, Zuko went with Mai to the bedroom she had been sharing with Ty Lee, and the rest of the adults went downstairs. Katara made tea, and she and Aang briefly explained the situation to Ty Lee. Her mouth fell open and she was silent for a few seconds… during which they heard Mai’s voice raised in anger from overhead, before she quickly quieted it, probably remembering that the children were asleep down the hallway.

“As the Fire Lord’s Chief of Security, I _cannot_ approve of this,” Ty Lee said with tightly contained vehemence. Anger was an unfamiliar sight on her cheerful, sweet-natured face, but it was there, filtered through hurt and disappointment… much of it surely on Mai’s behalf. “But as his subject, apparently I cannot object.”

“I completely understand,” said Katara. “I was happy to experiment—as carefully as we could manage—until I learned the reason. Then… well, Aang and Zuko convinced me there was a logic to it. To… redirecting those dark impulses. Like… like digging channels for floodwater, or for the lava flow from a volcano.”

Ty Lee rested her forehead on one hand. “Part of me understands that. But part of me is still screaming that the whole city is going to burn down.”

“Believe me,” said Katara, “there’s a part of me screaming that, too.”

“I trust you both,” Ty Lee said, raising her head again to look at them intently. “I know you’ve saved him before, Katara. Just… promise me you’ll do everything you can.”

“We promise,” Aang said.

“For our own sake, too,” Katara said forcefully.

They sat in silence for a while, barely hearing the murmur of voices rising and falling above them. To allay the awkwardness, Aang started making small talk about the things they’d done and seen that day, but none of them could pretend they were all that invested in the conversation, and it kept lapsing into silence again until someone made another heroic attempt to revive it.

Finally, about an hour after they had gone up, Mai and Zuko came back downstairs, both of them looking somber, their faces slightly flushed.

“You. Avatar,” Mai said sharply, and Aang turned to face her. “I expect you to bring my husband back with minimal damage. And if you don’t… I know where you sleep.”

The words could have been a joke, but Mai’s tone was completely serious… which might just have been a very good deadpan, but none of them were entirely sure. “I understand,” said Aang, his face and voice equally serious.

At dinner, Mai and Zuko were both subdued, while Aang and Ty Lee were trying too hard to compensate for the children’s sake. Bumi was happy to chatter enthusiastically about the marvels of Ember Island, and Izumi could sometimes be coaxed to join in, but her gaze kept turning back toward her parents and growing solemn.

Once the evening’s quiet activities were finished and the children in bed, satisfied with whatever stories and lullabies they had managed to wheedle out of their parents, the lovers retired once more to their respective bedrooms. Mai clung to Zuko’s hand a little longer than usual before she bade him good night, then turned back toward Ty Lee, who put an arm around her as they walked away.

“Is Mai all right?” Aang asked Zuko once they were behind closed doors.

“She will be,” said Zuko.

“What did she say?” Aang asked cautiously.

A pause. “She asked if— if Izumi wasn’t enough to keep me here. I said she was, and that’s why I need this.”

Of course Aang and Katara knew more had been said, and perhaps done, in the hour they had spent alone. But that was between Zuko and his wife. His position, on which the peace of the whole world depended, demanded that he remain at a distance from his lovers that they never had from each other. There were parts of their life together that he could not share with them; it stood to reason that there were parts of his life, too, that they could not share.

Tonight Katara ordered Zuko to fuck her again—face to face, this time; she wanted to look at him, and perhaps even more, she wanted _him_ to look at her. She might have ridden him to assert her claim, as she often did with Aang, but the point of being with Zuko like this was to savor the distinctive way _he_ fucked. So instead she lay on her back with him above her—guiding his movements with her legs, writing her satisfaction in nail-marks down his back—while Aang fingered him from behind, forcing him to break his usual stoic silence with gasps and groans of overwhelmed pleasure. Zuko finished before Katara did, biting back a cry as Aang’s hand worked and his arm wrapped around Zuko’s chest to hold him still.

Katara turned onto her side and motioned Aang behind her to take Zuko’s place, then pulled Zuko down to kiss her and guided his hand to her clit. She came shuddering against him, her leg around his thighs to pull him close and her arm reaching around the small of Aang’s back, and kept kissing Zuko, slowly and languidly, while Aang sought his release inside her.

She was pleasantly sore when they settled in to sleep after cleaning up. She tucked herself behind Zuko’s back, as usual, and let her fingers play over the lightning scar on his chest. She had saved him before, as Ty Lee had said; she hoped she wouldn’t be called upon to do it again… but if Zuko was to believed, it was Aang, with Katara’s cooperation, who was saving him precisely by putting him in danger. She didn’t know if she should be hoping that it was or wasn’t genuinely necessary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that got longer than I intended. Conversations and unnecessary worldbuilding details both have a tendency to get away from me.
> 
> Yes, the "Puppet Classic Theater" thing was a Muppets joke.


	5. The Trial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At last, the promised Avatar State smut.

The next morning, Aang and Zuko didn’t go beyond the courtyard of the beach house for their meditation and firebending exercises. They helped Mai and Ty Lee prepare breakfast, which Katara found ready by the time she dragged herself out of bed and made her way downstairs, and were especially solicitous in cleaning up after the children and making sure that everyone had all that they wanted (Zuko even got up partway through the meal to make another pot of tea when the first wasn’t empty yet), which felt like an apology of sorts.

The main activity planned for the day was a trip around the island in a small vessel which was powered only by woven-hemp sails, not by coal and steam, and was thus considered old-fashioned by Fire Nation standards. Such archaic ships, Zuko explained, were impractical, and much more difficult to control than steamships, so their use was largely confined to two very different categories of people: poor fishermen in outlying islands with a sailboat that had been passed down through generations of their family, who could not afford a new steamboat or the coal to fuel it; and wealthy noblemen who considered mastery of the difficult art of sailing such vessels to be a mark of distinction, and pursued it as a form of refined recreation.

Zuko had taken Aang and Katara sailing in such a vessel before, and Katara had remarked on how similar it was to Water Tribe ships in construction and operation. Some of that, Zuko said, was surely due simply to functional necessities—there are only so many effective ways to construct and operate a wind-sailed ship—but he had also learned of possible ties of ancestry between the Fire Nation and the Water Tribes. Before the war, he had learned, it was traditional knowledge in parts of the Fire Nation, especially its northern- and southernmost islands, that some of the first people to settle the archipelago were from the Water Tribes, and the inhabitants of those islands—many of whom had darker bronze skin and gray eyes tinged with blue—had once proudly claimed (distant) Water Tribe ancestry. Crewmates would say of an especially gifted sailor, _“Water Tribe blood runs strong in him”;_ if a young person was restless and felt the call to wander the seas, family and neighbors would say, _“Must be the Water Tribe in her.”_

Because of the resemblances to Water Tribe vessels, Katara had no trouble helping Zuko, Mai, and Ty Lee to steer the ship and adjust its sails to catch the wind at the proper angle. Aang, on the other hand, always had to be reminded how everything worked, and his attempts to help were sometimes less than helpful; Katara had to watch him to make sure he didn’t get the lines hopelessly tangled, or tighten or give slack to the wrong one, which might send them in the wrong direction at best and capsize them at worst. He was a little touchy about her obvious lack of faith in his competence, and suggested he might be more helpful just providing them with the wind they needed—which Zuko protested vociferously would be cheating, and would defeat the whole purpose of this exercise, which was to test their skill at sailing as their ancestors had, with nothing but their knowledge and their wits against the whims of wind and water.

“Never knew you to wax so poetic about sailing, Zuko,” Mai commented dryly.

Suddenly he turned embarrassed. “I just like doing things right,” he said.

“I think you mean you can never make things easier for yourself,” she returned.

They spent most of the day circumnavigating Ember Island and venturing a little into the calm waters surrounded on three sides by the islands of the Fire Nation. They had packed a lunch of rice balls and fresh vegetable-and-tofu spring rolls that they ate on the boat. When Bumi announced that he had to pee, Aang showed him to the head below deck where he could pee into a hole that emptied directly into the ocean. He found this as fascinating and delightful as only a three-year-old could.

They docked back at the beach house’s private pier in the late afternoon and spent the rest of the day lazing around on the beach until dinner, joined by Appa, who was happy to bask in the sun and remarkably tolerant about letting the children clamber all over him. All of the adults were a little quieter than usual, apprehensive as they were about what was planned for later in the evening.

Finally the children were in bed and it was time. Instead of just her usual good-night kiss on the cheek, Mai folded her husband in a firm, protective embrace. Zuko looked surprised at first, but then returned it just as firmly. After she released him, Mai fixed Aang with a gaze that could have bored holes in the wall. “Minimal damage,” she reminded him tightly. As she turned away, she let one of her wide sleeves fall open so that they caught a flashing glimpse of something sharp and metallic secured to her wrist.

Appa and Aang had already been to the place where they were going, so they had little trouble finding it even in the dimming twilight. Katara could only imagine how beautiful the field of wildflowers would be in the sunlight; it was beautiful enough in the low silver-blue light of moon, stars, and the last fading glow of the day, and the creek that flowed down a gentle slope between the meadow and the lush, deep woods caught the moonlight in sparks of silver and white.

Aang and Katara helped Zuko to lay out the linen bedsheet he had brought, folded into several layers to provide some cushioning on the ground. It was not blood-red like so much of the furnishing in the Fire Nation—which would have suggested a morbidly sacrificial mood, as well as being impractical, in the worst case, for detecting injuries—but a light autumnal clay-red that harmonized as well with Aang’s Air Nomad colors as it did with Zuko’s blood-colored Fire Nation garb.

Zuko stripped off his clothing, laid it neatly to the side, and unbound his hair from its topknot, all in silence and with an efficient, businesslike manner, which seemed to Katara to give the whole proceeding a grim, formal air—as if he was readying himself for a medical procedure rather than an act of love or passion. Aang also removed his clothing above the waist but left his trousers on, no doubt for comfort while sitting on the ground to meditate into the Avatar State.

Zuko reached into the pocket of his discarded trousers to retrieve a small vial of coconut oil, which he and Aang liked to use for this purpose. (For herself, Katara preferred the seaweed-derived gel that was traditionally used in the Water Tribes; she didn't like the texture of the oil, or the thought of putting something in her vagina that smelled so much like food.) Zuko handed the vial to Aang and got on his hands and knees facing away from him. Aang poured some of the oil onto his fingers and laid them gently over Zuko’s hole; his breathing hitched slightly at that first touch, but then he seemed to make an effort to breathe deeply and evenly as Aang first massaged circles over the sensitive skin, coaxing it to relax, then slid one finger inside.

Katara had watched them do this dozens of times, often with a hand between her own legs, but never in such weighty silence, with this feeling of grim necessity rather than desire; she didn’t know how they could stand it. She knelt in front of Zuko, laced her fingers into his loose hair, and kissed him, hoping to remind them both what this was about—what it _should_ be about. He looked slightly apprehensive at first as she approached (he might have expected another reprimand), but he returned her kiss with warmth, perhaps (she imagined) even with gratitude.

When Aang finished preparing Zuko and moved away to rinse his fingers in the creek, Zuko pulled his lips away from Katara’s. He looked at her seriously with a question in his eyes—asking once more for her blessing, which she had only reluctantly given. She was still reluctant—she could not pretend otherwise—but she sat back onto her heels and nodded. Zuko turned away and lay on his back on the folded sheet, knees up and legs spread, trembling slightly though the evening air was warm and still, like a dutiful bride on her wedding night, waiting to be claimed by a husband she had barely met. His cock lay half-hard on his belly, testifying to a mix of anticipation and hesitation… and probably also a fair bit of self-conscious embarrassment.

Aang now sat a few paces away in the lotus position, his eyes closed. Seconds passed with aching slowness while Zuko and Katara waited for the white glow to awaken in his arrow tattoos. Finally it came, bright enough to blind her at first; then, when her vision adjusted, he illuminated the whole clearing with a ghostly light, making Zuko’s already pale skin look almost corpse-like. Aang’s eyes opened and they were no longer _his_ eyes, deep gray and warm or sparkling with mischief, but blank white windows through which the Avatar Spirit gazed out, otherworldly and impassive when it was not furious and vengeful.

Aang, or the Avatar Spirit, turned those luminous, impassive eyes toward his lovers. At least Katara could feel that he recognized them; when he went into the Avatar State out of uncontrollable rage or dire necessity, she wasn’t always sure that he knew her, and it felt like she had to remind him who she was, as well as who _he_ was, when she called him back to himself. Now he looked at Katara with a kind of distant benevolence, as if she were an old friend he remembered fondly.

Then he turned his gaze toward Zuko and intent awakened in his eyes. He crawled forward over the short distance between them, and Katara had a fleeting vision of him as a polar leopard stalking an unwitting turtle-seal, moving in for the kill. Katara saw Zuko’s cock twitch as Aang approached with that intent, eerily glowing gaze fixed on him. It should have been terrifying—and perhaps it was; Aang had said that Zuko’s arousal had been sharpened by his fear, and so it seemed to be now.

Aang knelt between Zuko’s legs, bent over his supine body, and the scar breaking the line of the arrow tattoo down his back looked even starker when the dark spot interrupted the vivid line of white light that pierced through the darkness around them. Aang unlaced his own trousers to draw out his cock, which needed only a few strokes of his hand to grow fully hard. Precise and efficient rather than gentle, he slid one hand, lit by the glowing arrow that ran down from his shoulder, under Zuko’s hips to lift them up, and with the other hand positioned himself. Just as precise and efficient—neither sliding in as slowly and gently as he usually did, nor ramming in with brutal force—he brought his hips forward to push inside.

Zuko tipped his head back and cried out as soon as Aang entered him. This was uncharacteristic of him: early on, Zuko had internalized some strict expectations about how men were supposed to comport themselves during sex, and Aang and Katara still had not managed to dislodge them. For the most part he remained as stoically quiet when he was the one being fucked as when he was fucking, allowing himself only the occasional soft grunt, gasp, or sigh when his lover hit just the right spot, or of course when he climaxed. Katara considered it a great victory, and a compliment to her skill, when she drew a whimper or a low groan from his throat; an actual moan was a sign of almost overwhelming pleasure, which she and Aang always aimed for but only occasionally achieved.

But this immediate, helpless, full-throated cry could only be a sign of either unbearable ecstasy or pain; the way his back had arched and his eyes rolled back could have told either way. Katara shifted herself closer to him to try to see whether anything was obviously wrong, and she met the Avatar’s eyes. He shook his head slightly—assuring her that no harm was done, or warning her away? She could see how Zuko’s cock, flushed dark and fully hard, strained between their bodies, and she took that as evidence that his reaction had been one of pleasure… or if there was pain involved, it was the kind that he enjoyed, and not yet severe enough to worry about. She nodded her acknowledgment to the Avatar and sat back again, not interfering for now, but still close enough to reach either of them if need be.

Aang started moving, as silent and relentless as Zuko usually was. Each of Zuko’s breaths, quickened to match the rhythm of Aang’s thrusts, was edged with a whimper or a sob that sometimes burst into another cry, quieter and more ragged than the first. His hips were straining upward, seeking friction against Aang’s body, and at last in frustration he reached for his swollen cock. But Aang quickly grasped his wrist and pushed it back to the ground beside his head, then pinned his other wrist in the same way. Zuko gasped—in indignant surprise, perhaps; or was it pleased surprise that Aang was finally showing the merciless harshness Zuko had always sought from him in vain, and instead had to turn to Katara (or perhaps Mai) to find?

The wind was starting to pick up around them, raising gooseflesh and stirring the little hairs on Katara’s bare arms, but Zuko seemed not to feel the chill; in fact, she noticed that his hair was undisturbed, and she realized that he and Aang were sheltered in the eye of the winds circling them. She could feel the turbulence of the water in the creek beside them even without seeing it, would have felt it even if she couldn’t hear it—the way it was drawn to the strength of Aang’s presence, two competing currents creating restless waves and short-lived whirlpools almost like a storm at sea. The earth beneath them was trembling as if with the ripples of a distant earthquake, and lurched occasionally in time with Aang’s more forceful thrusts, making Katara’s heart seem to jump into her throat and her nerves hum with something between excitement and fear.

As little as she liked any of this, Katara could not help the heat that flared in her loins at what she saw and heard. Under any other circumstances, she would be shamelessly touching herself watching them together (or if one of them was in a position to have a hand free, he might be touching her instead). She scolded herself for being aroused by this, by Aang’s awe-inspiring power and Zuko’s helpless vulnerability; she shifted uncomfortably where she sat but otherwise did nothing to acknowledge her body’s inopportune reaction.

Zuko’s sobbing gasps grew louder and more drawn-out, the fruitless thrusts of his hips more desperate and erratic. He finally came with a long, low cry, his untouched cock throbbing out his release in bursts of white over his stomach and chest. Katara found herself breathing harder, pressing her thighs together to try to smother the embers of want between them.

Aang did not pause in his inexorable rhythm when Zuko finished; the only indication that he had even noticed was that he slowed minutely for a few beats. Katara knew that Zuko must be painfully oversensitive now, and it was uncharacteristic—even unsettlingly so—that Aang took no heed of that, did not take care to be gentle or give him time to recover. Zuko’s whimpering sounds now did sound pained, and he seemed to be trying to pull away; the muscles of his arms tensed against Aang’s grip, which tightened in response. Katara debated whether it was time to intervene, but Zuko was making no real effort to struggle out of Aang’s hold, and his whimpers had turned to sighing breaths that might have expressed either pleasure or pain.

Then Aang bent down to kiss him—his glowing eyes still eerily open, their harsh light throwing the dark contours of Zuko’s scar into stark relief—and instead of shrinking back, Zuko’s body arched toward his again. Aang kept driving into him in the same relentless rhythm, then his pace became uneven, quickening and slowing by turns, until with one last thrust his body stilled and he raised his head, pulling his lips away from Zuko’s. The glow in his eyes grew impossibly brighter for a few moments, and Katara had to squint and shade her eyes with one hand to keep looking at him. When Aang finished inside him, Zuko let out another ragged cry of the same almost pained-sounding ecstasy as when Aang had first entered him, or when he himself had finished.

Slowly the glow in Aang’s eyes and tattoos faded. He blinked a few times, as if waking from a dream and realizing where he was, then he looked down at Zuko beneath him and his expression grew alarmed. He quickly let go of Zuko’s wrists and sat back away from him, letting his cock slip out. He hissed in dismay at something and said, “Spirits, Zuko, are you all right? Did I hurt you?”

Katara could no longer see as well without the glow of the Avatar State; she had to wait for her eyes to readjust to the darkness before she could see what had prompted Aang’s concern. As Katara’s vision improved, the first thing she noticed was that Zuko’s head had lolled to the side and his eyes were closed. He was still breathing—she could see his chest rising and falling, slowly but more shallowly than in sleep—but he seemed to be unconscious; Aang was gently shaking his shoulder, then put a hand to his face and stroked his thumb over his cheek, combed the hair back from his face, sounding increasingly distraught as he said, “Zuko? Please tell me you’re all right.”

Katara, taking a less gentle approach (as usual), bent some water out of the creek and splashed it over Zuko’s face. He shuddered and opened his eyes, which only slowly came into focus, looking disoriented.

“Oh, thank Heaven,” Aang sighed out. “Zuko, are you okay? How are you feeling?”

Zuko turned his head to look up at Aang. “I’m—” he started, his voice a dry croak, but then he shook his head slightly.

“You need water,” Aang concluded, and bent some out of the creek toward Zuko's mouth. Once he’d taken a few sips, he waved a hand to indicate that he didn’t need the rest right now, so Aang dropped it back in the creek.

“I’m all right,” Zuko said hoarsely.

“But I hurt you,” Aang fretted. Katara wasn’t sure yet how Aang thought he had hurt Zuko, so she started checking him over and quickly noticed bright red welts around his forearms where Aang had gripped them. She bent some more water from the creek to wrap around the burns, which soon faded to slightly pinker stripes of healed new skin.

“Didn’t hurt,” Zuko slurred as the water touched his skin, sounding almost drunk. “Not like my tutors. Or…” He stopped himself before he finished that sentence—he’d probably thought better of bringing it up in this situation—but he didn’t need to.

“Even if you didn’t really feel it, I still hurt you, and I didn’t want to.”

“Worth it,” said Zuko, the words still mushy but his tone emphatic and his conviction clear.

Once the water had healed the burns on his arms, Katara examined the rest of him more carefully. He groaned when she nudged him to turn onto his side and made more little noises of complaint as she prodded at his shoulder blades, his spine, the back of his ribcage; probably bruised from the slight tremors of the ground beneath him. Katara laid another thin sheet of water over his back and down to his tailbone, and this time he sighed quietly with relief as the water did its work.

“I’m sorry,” said Aang, solicitously pushing Zuko’s hair behind his ear.

“ ’s fine,” Zuko assured him again. “More than fine.”

“Did you… did you get what you needed out of it?” Aang asked softly, hesitantly.

“Not sure yet,” Zuko admitted. “But… it was…” He trailed off, his eyes going unfocused again. “I can’t even find words to describe it. It’s… like nothing I’ve ever felt.”

“I thought it was a little like standing in the dragons’ fire,” Aang said.

Zuko’s right eye widened in recognition. “Yes, a little… but… closer. More intimate.”

“Like having the dragons’ fire inside you.”

This was a sharp reminder for Katara that there were things Aang and Zuko had experienced together that she would never share. Of course, that was true of any two of them in relation to the third. Aang had not been there when Katara confronted her mother’s murderer and realized nothing would be gained by killing him; he had not been there when Zuko fought Azula under the burning comet and threw himself in front of the lightning bolt that had been meant for Katara. And Katara could not even count the experiences she and Aang had shared without Zuko, either before or after he had become their friend and lover. Still, it was a lonely feeling being reminded of the things that were theirs alone, that she could never fully understand. This experience was just one more to add.

Katara determined that Zuko had not sustained any further physical injuries. “Can you sit up?” she asked him.

He tried levering himself onto his elbows, but they shook so badly that he collapsed back down onto his back. “I don’t think so,” he said, his lips and tongue still clumsy.

“Okay, we can work with that,” Katara assured him with a wry smile. She bent some more water to wet the lower corners of the sheet he was lying on and started to use it to clean him up, but he muttered something indignant about not being a baby, and then made a very toddler-like grasping gesture with his hand, asking her to fold over the damp corner of the sheet so he could reach it. She handed one corner up to him, and he slowly and shakily wiped off his chest and stomach, then she passed him the other corner and near-instinctively looked away to give him privacy while he cleaned between his legs.

Aang quickly re-wrapped his kashaya and chogyu, and he and Katara helped Zuko dress (just the short-sleeved shirt and trousers; there was no point in bothering with the over-tunic). They didn’t like Zuko’s chances of being able to walk back up the slope to the meadow where Appa was waiting—and they couldn’t exactly carry him—so Aang blew his whistle to summon the bison. Appa came loping down the hill and greeted them with a rumble that Katara thought might have sounded concerned… and Aang confirmed that impression by saying, “We’re all okay, buddy. Zuko’s just… a little tired.”

Aang and Katara slung their “a little tired” lover’s arms over their shoulders and hoisted him to his feet. They helped him stumble, still shaky but carrying some of his own weight, the few steps over to where Appa crouched, waiting for them to mount. Getting him up into the saddle required a helping boost of air from Aang, and once he was there he flopped onto his back again with a groan. Katara went back to gather up the sheet and Zuko’s tunic and climbed into the saddle with Zuko while Aang seated himself on Appa’s shoulders to guide him home.

It was barely a half hour’s flight back to Ember Island, but Zuko was already asleep less than halfway there. Katara had to wake him when they landed so that they could help him down from the saddle and then up the stairs to their bedroom—which was less of an ordeal than she’d feared; apparently his little nap had restored some strength and steadiness to his limbs.

Mai was waiting outside the door to her bedroom, with a long robe over her nightdress, eyes narrowed, lips tight, and arms folded. She must have heard them land or come in; and she would have seen Aang helping Zuko unsteadily up the stairs and Katara following them closely with a watchful eye out for any slips, but they hadn’t seen her on the way up because they were mostly looking down at Zuko’s feet.

“Did you break my husband, Avatar?” Mai asked in a cold, clipped tone when they reached the top of the stairs, Zuko’s arm still over Aang’s shoulder for support and Aang’s arm around Zuko’s waist.

“Not broken,” Zuko protested, less mushy than before. “Just… a little wobbly. I’ll be back to normal in the morning.”

Mai’s eyes slowly made their way down his body and stopped at his right wrist, which was hanging down at his side, while his left was obscured by Aang’s neck. She darted forward to grab his wrist and examine the faint pinkish marks, the shape and width of a hand, and looked accusingly at Aang for an explanation.

“I’m sorry, Mai, I didn’t mean to— Katara was there to heal it, look, it’s good as new…”

“You don’t usually make a fuss about my marks and bruises,” Zuko noted with amusement, interrupting Aang’s stammered apologies.

“I think you can appreciate that the circumstances here are a little different,” Mai said, her voice still sharp and chilly.

Zuko eased his left hand out of Aang’s grip and his arm off his shoulders; Aang watched him carefully and kept a hand resting on Zuko’s back in case he needed to steady him, but he seemed to be able to stand on his own and even take the few steps over to Mai. He put his hands on either side of her face and said, quietly and firmly, “I’m all right. They would never have let any harm come to me.” He rested his forehead against hers.

For a few silent moments, none of them moved. Then Mai sniffed and said thickly, “Because they know I know where they sleep.”

Zuko laughed softly. “It is a terrifying thought.” He brought his hands down from her face to rest briefly on her shoulders before he stroked them comfortingly down her arms and stepped away—or tried to; he stumbled a little trying to move backwards and Mai had to grab his arm to keep him upright. She shot another resentful look at Aang as he hurriedly came to his friend’s rescue.

“Just a little worn out,” Zuko insisted. “I’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep.”

“Good night, Mai,” Katara said gently, giving her a sympathetic look. Mai just nodded in acknowledgment and watched them make their way down the hall to their bedroom, Zuko leaning on Aang again and Katara bringing up the rear.

Katara and Aang helped Zuko into bed, then stripped to their undergarments and climbed in on either side of him. Katara snuggled close against his back and wrapped her arm around him protectively. He gave her hand on his chest a somewhat feeble squeeze in acknowledgment.

“What was it like?” she asked tentatively. “I don’t know what the dragons’ fire felt like, so… try to describe it in terms I can understand.”

“Are you asking me or Aang?” He was articulating far more clearly than earlier, which was reassuring.

“Mostly you,” she said. She knew she could never feel what Aang had felt—neither of them could—but she could ask Aang to do the same for her if she wanted to understand Zuko’s experience… and maybe come as close as possible to understanding Aang’s. “But… both, I guess.”

Zuko hummed in thought. After a long pause, he said, “It was like… like having the sun inside me. Being seen and judged and _known_ by something so ancient and powerful that there’s nothing it hasn’t experienced… something that’s lived thousands of years, hundreds of lifetimes, and knows everything there is to know about life and death, body and spirit… And you’d think it would be above things like love and desire, but it isn’t, it never gets past them or outlives them; instead it feels them more intensely than we’d ever be able to, with all its knowledge and past experience folded into what it feels. It knew, somehow, what I felt and what I wanted, knew it better than I knew myself, like it was nothing it hadn’t seen before—like there’s nothing new under the sun—but there was no contempt in it, just a profound benevolence, and an overwhelming desire for… something I didn’t understand, but it was all focused on me, and…” He trailed off, having run out of words.

“It wanted to bring you peace,” Aang said quietly from Zuko’s other side. “It felt how you were at war with yourself, and it cares about you because I do, and it is me… sort of. It loves what I love, and wants who I want, but it sees more than I do, and when it sees something wrong—something out of balance—it wants to set it right.”

“But not by killing me, evidently,” Zuko said wryly, recalling what he had said the previous morning. He might be able to joke about it, but it still sat like stones in Katara’s stomach.

“You might think that would bring _you_ peace,” Aang said, far less accusingly than Katara would have, “but it would upset the balance of a much greater part of the world.”

“Good to know the Avatar Spirit is thinking about geopolitics during sex…”

That actually succeeded in making Aang chuckle. “It would upset _my_ balance, too. I need both of you to be at peace. Water and fire; moon and sun.”

“And here I’d thought you liked _me_ , not just my element.”

“Hey, if I were looking for the full complement, I’d be sleeping with Toph, too.”

“Now _that_ is a terrifying thought,” Katara put in.

“Enjoy those nightmares…” Zuko said pleasantly.

That reminded Katara of something that made her turn serious again. “Have you changed the ending of the dream?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “I’ll let you know if it comes back.”

“Don’t tell me you’ll want to do that again,” Aang said dubiously.

“It’s not out of the question,” Zuko said, a little too lightly. “But… next time maybe just for fun.”


	6. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aang's past lives have some opinions on his recent activities in the Avatar State.

The next time Aang meditated into the Avatar State to confer with his past lives was a month later. Toph’s loosely organized Republic City constabulary was struggling to deal with the growth of gangs of rogue benders who were demanding that business owners in their ‘territory’ pay to be protected from attack, supposedly by their rival gangs… but mostly, in reality, from attacks by the ‘protecting’ gang itself. Aang wasn’t sure if the Republic City authorities should try to come to some accommodation with these ‘Triads’ (as they had come to be known) or just do their best to suppress them; he had never dealt with organized crime before. But he knew that Kyoshi had not only encountered it, but had even traveled with, learned bending techniques from, and befriended members of such a criminal organization, so he thought she might have some insight into how to stop them from extorting the honest citizens of Republic City with minimal bloodshed.

When Aang emerged into the Spirit World, he expected to find only Roku sitting before him at first, then he would have to meditate farther in to be able to speak with Kyoshi. But instead, he found himself confronted by all four of his most recent incarnations, all of them standing rather than sitting in a way that struck him as somewhat ominous, and all with different expressions on their faces. Roku looked the most thoroughly perturbed: his arms were folded, his shoulders tense, and his expression was indignant, even irate; if he had access to his bending power, he looked like he would be quite literally fuming. Kyoshi merely looked mildly annoyed or perhaps disapproving, while Kuruk’s mouth kept twitching into an amused smile that he would try to suppress whenever he looked in Roku’s direction, and Yangchen just looked like she didn’t want to be there.

Aang stood up so that his past lives wouldn’t be looking down at him so menacingly. “Is something wrong?” he asked cautiously. “I didn’t expect to see all of you here at once…”

“Is something _wrong?”_ Roku repeated incredulously, as if Aang should have known. This left him no more enlightened than before.

Kyoshi rolled her eyes and sighed. “Aang, when was the last time you went into the Avatar State?” she asked, as if she were a teacher helping a slow child.

“Um…” He hadn’t needed to call upon it to fight any of the Triad benders, yet, so that meant the most recent occasion had been a month ago, when he… “Oh.”

“Yes, ‘oh,’” Kyoshi said dryly, then gave him a tight-lipped smile.

Although Aang’s body had not actually come with him, the projection of a face he had brought into the Spirit World felt like it was on fire. “I’m so sorry,” he said, putting his hands over his burning face. “I didn’t know you could see _everything_ I do in the Avatar State… I thought I had to summon you like this, intending specifically to talk to you…”

“When you go into the Avatar State, you have immediate access to the knowledge and power of all of your past lives because we are all present in the awakened Avatar Spirit,” Yangchen explained, patient and kind but also with a touch of Kyoshi’s pitying condescension.

“Oh, Lion-Turtle turds…” Aang mumbled into his palms, which he pressed even more tightly over his eyes.

“Don’t worry,” Kuruk said heartily, clapping a hand to Aang’s shoulder. “You’re far from the first one who’s done it.”

“Perhaps,” Roku finally said in (very Mai-like) clipped tones—his first input since his initial outburst—“but he might be the first to— to _fornicate_ with his previous incarnation’s _great-grandson_ while said previous incarnation is forced to watch.”

Kuruk shrugged. “Kyoshi fucked my ex’s daughter in the Avatar State. It didn’t bother me. Not that much, anyway.”

“Please don’t tell me you… enjoyed seeing her resemblance to her mother,” Kyoshi said icily.

“What? No! No, it was a little painful seeing her face combined with someone else’s; Rangi was as clearly Junsik’s daughter as Hei-Ran’s. I’m just saying, I didn’t blame you. Most of us have wanted to find out what it was like.”

“ _I_ didn’t,” Roku said primly.

Now Kuruk rolled his eyes in much the same way as Kyoshi had; Aang could see how some mannerisms carried over from one life to the next, and wondered what quirks he might share with Roku. “Of course you didn’t,” Kuruk said.

“Did you?” Aang asked Yangchen; it seemed a bit out of character from what little he knew of her… but then, there was a lot about her that he didn’t know.

Yangchen’s cheeks pinked just slightly. “I… experimented alone,” she said. “I worried about putting someone else in danger… but of course I was curious about how it would feel.”

“Did you all stop doing it once you found out that your previous lives could see?” Aang wanted to know.

Kuruk laughed uproariously. “After knowing what it felt like, you think I stopped because some prissy dead people had a problem?”

“Shameless exhibitionist,” Roku muttered.

Kuruk shook his head and sighed. “What is it with you Fire Nation Avatars, anyway? Yangchen was raised by nuns, and she was never that prudish about it.”

“I was embarrassed when I learned, of course,” said Kyoshi in answer to Aang’s question. “But since _most_ of my predecessors were tolerant and understanding, I… continued to indulge occasionally.”

“We just told Szeto to suck it up,” Kuruk added. “He could always close his eyes and stick his fingers in his ears… spiritually speaking.”

“But you still _know it’s happening_ ,” Roku protested. “And did I mention that it was _my great-grandson_ he was… ‘indulging’?”

“No, we hadn’t heard,” Yangchen said mildly. Kuruk guffawed. “We were all a little concerned about what you and the Spirit were thinking,” Yangchen said, turning back to Aang.

“Indulging my apparently _suicidal_ great-grandson,” Roku muttered, his arms still tightly folded.

“ _You’re_ the one who told me I should—” Aang started to retort, but Kyoshi held up a hand and he stopped short.

“ _Most_ of us think you did the right thing,” said Kyoshi, casting a significant raised-eyebrows glance over at Roku, who glared back and muttered something inaudible. “Being the Avatar has always come with difficult choices, often concerning the people we love. And it is hard to love the Avatar, too.”

“I’m sure you don’t need us to tell you to be careful,” Yangchen said gently.

“No, I know,” said Aang. “And… I think it did help him, in the end.”

“Don’t be surprised if he asks for repeat doses, though, eh?” said Kuruk, waggling his eyebrows.

“Could you just _try_ to treat this seriously?” Kyoshi snapped at him. He cleared his throat and composed his face into a grave expression, but didn’t look sincere or at all chagrined.

“Let us hope that once will be enough,” Roku said emphatically.

“We’ll see,” said Aang, a little impishly. “He _did_ say he might want to do it again, just for fun.”

Roku groaned and clapped a hand over his face—a very Zuko-like gesture, Aang noted.

“You might want to warn him that his great-grandfather is aware of it, though,” Yangchen said.

“And that he is _not happy about it_ ,” Roku added.

“That might… put him off a bit,” Aang acknowledged.

“From your mouth to Agni’s ears,” Roku muttered.

“But we won’t judge if you want to give your lovely waterbending wife the same unparalleled experience,” said Kuruk.

Yangchen looked askance at him with eyes narrowed in suspicion; Kyoshi gave him a look of outright disgust. “ _Really_ , Kuruk?” she said.

“What, you think I want to watch?” he protested. “Of course not! I’m not _that_ crass.”

“But you can’t pretend you don’t miss the, ah, pleasures of the flesh,” said Yangchen. “Especially since you had relatively few years in which to enjoy them…”

“Ah, but I lived those years to the fullest. No, I just want the best of my own experience for my fellow tribeswoman, and my reincarnation.”

Roku was looking at the rest of them with an air of martyred resignation.

“I apologize again for the, uh, unannounced show,” Aang said delicately. “And thank you for your understanding,” he added, significantly not looking at Roku. “But I actually came to ask Kyoshi about something else…”

“She might also have some advice on how to show your wife an unparalleled experience…”

With a last contemptuous eyeroll, Kyoshi waved a hand and the other three vanished. “I apologize for my predecessor,” she said—then, after a pause, and with a tiny smirk, she added, “but on that last point, he isn’t wrong.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This little crack-y epilogue was kind of how the idea started... and then it went in some other directions.


End file.
